You can’t exactly call it a mothball fleet because most — if not all — of the 260-odd Eclipse 500s built and delivered before the company quit production are still in regular use, doing — more or less, considering the “unfinished” status of some of the avionics — exactly what they were designed to do.

Doing it rather well, as far as that goes.

Still, the Delaware Bankruptcy Court considering the matter of Eclipse Aviation’s liquidation is at some point going to have to resolve the matter of who gets what’s left of the spoils — intellectual property such as design and engineering documents, patents for crucial parts, tooling, etc. It’s a decision that’s likely to have a profound effect on the viability of the existing fleet over the years, and perhaps decades, ahead.

No one ever said that navigating Eclipse through dark and moneyless skies would be easy, but it began to look substantially more difficult last week with the apparent collapse and bankruptcy of Rolfe Pieper’s Luxembourg-based ETIRIC (European Technology and Investment Research Center) amidst indictments, lawsuits and counter lawsuits charging post-Vern Rayburn managers of Eclipse with everything from misappropriating customers’ deposits on new aircraft to pay off their own loans to Eclipse, to making unfounded promises of new financing being in the pipeline.

Pieper, who responded to the charges by telling European media that “I’m not worried. I just watch out” is the magic money man who forced Raburn out of Eclipse with sometimes conflicting promises to a.)continue producing Eclipse 500s in the U.S. after refinancing the company with capital from his own private investment group or b.) relocate it to the former Soviet Union, where production would be financed by the Russian government and state bank, which Pieper avowed, were both firmly under the virtually dictatorial control of his bud, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Note: Evidence introduced in a February 2009 filing to force Eclipse out of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy and into a Chapter 7 proceeding indicated that the Russian state bank in question, Vnesheconombank (VEB), was itself insolvent at the time Pieper was touting its willingness to dump roughly $205 million (USD) into Eclipse. (The motion to convert Eclipse’s Chapter 11 filing into Chapter 7, which virtually guarantees the company will be liquidated, was tentatively approved by the court on March 4.)

Edgy — to use as non-judgmental a word as possible — financial machinations are hardly news in today’s economy, but that doesn’t stop them from drawing generally good audience ratings in the reality show of life. Unfortunately, the latest revelations do nothing for existing Eclipse owners and operators wondering if their aircraft will a.) ever be upgradeable to the advanced GPS performance standards and known-icing certification they were promised when they placed their orders and b.) whether the resale value curve of their 500 will be more like that of a 1961 Corvette than it will that of a 1961 Ford Falcon.

Offering hope, on the other hand, are four groups vying for court approval to pick up the pieces and attempt to bring order out of the Eclipse chaos. The three considered most likely to succeed are an effort by air-taxi operator Linear Air, a co-op supported by management company Jet-Alliance and several 500 owners, and an owner/investor partnership suggested by Harlow Aerostructures CEO Phillip Friedman. (The fourth contender is believed to out of the running due to close ties with Roel Pieper. )

Since we discussed Linear’s non-profit, co-op Eclipse Services and Support LLC initiative in a previous post, we’ll concentrate on the other two proposals here.

The most intriguing of all the Eclipse recovery plans is Friedman’s brainchild, New Eclipse Aviation LLC (NEA), which envisions nothing less than the eventual restoration of Eclipse as an independent manufacturer of brand new, state-of-the-art VLJs.

Friedman’s plan, while attractive in that it provides for “at-cost” (approximately $300,000 for complete GPS and glass cockpit makeovers) upgrades, also requires that existing owners invest $150,000 (plus annual support fees) in New Eclipse to qualify for the discounted upgrades.

Looked at objectively, the NEA plan — if fully realized — probably offers the most potential benefits to owners. It would provide for relatively low-cost aircraft upgrades, thus increasingly functionality and resale value, and an owner’s investment in New Eclipse could become highly profitable if the company eventually went into production successfully.

“Fully realizing” a plan, however, is even harder in commercial aviation than in most fields of endeavor. Any breakdowns along the way — such as the failure of a large number of current owners to sign on — could have a catastrophic effect on the financial wind between New Eclipse’s wings.

Without naming names, but perhaps mindful of New Eclipse’s buy-in requirements, the Eclipse Owners Group (EOG) effort, championed by Jet-Alliance CEO Randall P. Sanada and Eclipse owner David Green, has stated that it intends to try and acquire Eclipse’s remaining assets because proposals from some of the other suitors “are shortsighted and place undue burdens on an already overtaxed customer base.”

Far more modest than Friedman’s “resurrection” plan, the EOG’s stated goal is obtaining “full control of the serviceability, modification and long-term reliability” of the existing Eclipse fleet. EOG also put at least a few points on the scoreboard when it signed a letter of intent with Hawker Beechcraft in which the latter contracted to provide service and upgrade support to current Eclipse owners on an ad hoc basis. (The points may or may not stay on the board dependent on whether the original non-binding agreement is eventually superseded by a binding one.)

Bottomline is that with a liquidation auction for Eclipse’s bones anywhere (depending on which predictions you chose to believe) from days to an eternity away, the prospects for existing Eclipse owners isn’t nearly as dark as it could be.

Despite being not quite fuly formed, the embryonic 500 has proven to an efficient, economical and reliable performer for private, small corporation and air-taxi operators. With the cost of new light and very light aircraft constantly escalating by hundreds of thousands of dollars, the value proposition — and the potential vendor and outfitter profit potential — in upgrading the existing Eclipse fleet has increased proportionally.

Sooner or later some entrepreneurial entity, either one of the groups described above or another not yet on the horizon, is almost sure to come forward and provide the Bondo needed to fill the chinks in the Eclipse 500’s armor.

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It’s called, as you undoubtedly know by now, the Large Aircraft Security Program (LASP) and it would, according to its many opponents in Congress, state governments and the general-aviation industry, place the same crown of costly post-9/11 security thorns already borne by scheduled airlines firmly upon the heads of corporate aircraft owners, air freight companies and community airport operators.

Michigan GOP Congressman Vernon Ehlers calls it “a prime example of a stupid rule.”

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin says it imposes “numerous unnecessary requirements on both airports and aircraft operators that are already struggling in the wake of both national and industry economic crisis.”

It is, claims House Aviation Subcommittee Chairman Jerry Costello (D-Ill) “a solution in search of a problem.”

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) says it’s “an unreasonably expansive and intrusive response to an undocumented and unproven security threat.”

And as far as National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) President Ed Bolen is concerned “this proposal completely misses the mark.”

The truth is the that the Transportation Security Administration’s proposed Large Aircraft Security Program has created a firestorm of protest. Of the approximately 5,000 public comments registered with the TSA before the flood of “incoming” was terminated February 27, the “nays” vastly outweighed the “yeas” in both quantity and VIPness.

In other words, none of the few submissions favoring the LASP had anywhere near the political clout of the 23-page treatise filed against it by a coalition of seven Republican members of Congress, all of whom, by dint of political philosophy and/or party affiliation, tend to be bullish on any proposal packaged in a “national security” wrapper.

If it sounds to you like the LASP has few friends, you’ve just passed the hearing test. Outside the agency that created it, public support for the proposal is slim to anorexic. But then, it probably doesn’t need many allies.

Since the day it was spawned in the aftermath of 9/11, the TSA has generally gotten everything it wanted, with or without enthusiastic support from members of Congress — some of whom, like Sen. Ted Kennedy, have been inexplicably bounced from flights by its perhaps overly politicized computers. And while President Obama undoubtedly views quasi-constitutional regulations a bit differently than former President Bush, he’s unlikely to squander political capital this early in his administration by opposing what is being touted by the TSA as “a strong common framework for security that will reduce risk.”

Besides, the TSA craftily side-stepped the one issue that might cause any recession-era president to veto alleged nation security measures by putting virtually the entire just-under-$2 billion (TSA estimated) burden of complying with LASP on GA aircraft operators and local airport authorities.

Since every action – particularly every political action — has a reaction, there are, of course, certain air-transport stakeholders who do potentially stand to benefit if the LASP rules go into effect, as now proposed, in June. Members of the airline and air taxi industry, for example, can be forgiven for inwardly cheering their heads off and their lungs out in favor of the TSA’s position as they stand publicly silent on the sidelines of the debate.

Like sex appeal, the LASP is largely about weight. It only applies to aircraft with a maximum takeoff weight above 12,500 pounds and airports capable of being used by such middleweights. If adopted, the potential benefit to airlines and air taxies is obvious and identical. By raising the operating costs of most business-class jets and turboprops it could force executive travelers out of their Lears, Gulfstreams and Citations and onto commercial airline or air taxi flights. (Note: Of all aircraft now being used, or considered as likely future candidates, for air-taxi service only the Embraer Phenom 300 tops the LASP weight limit.)

As currently structured, LASP would cover about 15,000 business-class aircraft and more than 320 airports not served by scheduled airlines. It would require airline pilot-level screening of all flight crew members, passenger screening through two TSA “watch” lists and establishment of mandated operator security programs requiring specially trained personnel.

Aircraft operators would also be required to create and enforce detailed contingency plans for everything from denying boarding to anyone on the TSA no-fly list, to validating name matches, to ensuring that passengers don’t smuggle articles newly prohibited by LASP — like tools — onto the business aircraft taking them to the job where the tools will be needed.

Operators of airports falling under the LASP’s heel (officially described as DOT-defined reliever airports or public or private airports that regular serve scheduled or public charter operations of aircraft above the weight limit) will have to hire officially designated airport security coordinators, hire or retrain law-enforcement personnel, create TSA-mandated record retention programs, devise procedures for handling and protecting undefined “sensitive security information,” and redefine “incidence-management procedures” to suit the whims of Washington bureaucrats.

No wonder the American Association of Airport Executives became so livid at the introduction of the proposal that it accused the TSA of violating everything from the Privacy Act of 1974, to the Unfunded Mandate Act of 1995, to the Second and Fourth Amendments of the United States Constitution.

Be that as it may, the odds favor the imposition of some version of the LASP that will give at least a slight advantage to air taxi operators regardless of how it is modified to pacify some of its critics.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that many believe that LASP is only a stalking horse for a UASP (Universal Aircraft Security Program) that will impose similar restrictions and requirements on every heavier-or-lighter-than-air flying machine down to Stearman bi-planes, Piper Cub J3s (max. takeoff weight: 1220 pounds) and the Goodyear blimp.

The TSA, they point out, has historically been as preoccupied with empire building as national security and needs to constantly invent new jobs and programs if it wishes to take maximum advantage of the unlimited staffing power given to it by Congress.

Is the theory that the TSA eventually intends to morph LASP into UASP based in reality or paranoia?

Frankly, we don’t have a clue.

But we do have some admittedly circumstantial evidence.

In November, the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued new regulations requiring “any aircraft, other than government or military, which are not engaged in carrying passengers or cargo for compensation” to abide by scheduled-airline-level aircraft and passenger screening and notification rules prior to entering or leaving the country.

Lest anyone misunderstand the meaning of “any aircraft, other than govenrment and military, etc.” the Bureau provided an even more specific definition: Private aircraft arriving in and departing from the United States, regardless of size or weight.

And what does that have to do with LASP? Not much, except that both LASP and the new CBP regulations were published at virtually the same time and sound like they were written by the same people based on the same real or imagined assumptions.

One other “coincidence.” The Transportation Security Administration and the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection are both among the most favored offspring of the Department of Homeland Security.

Reality or paranoia? You be the judge.

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Are the air taxi good times really over for good almost before they got started?

Impossible.

Are they over for the next ten years?

Almost certainly not.

The next five years?

Unlikely.

How long then?

According to a surprisingly large number of industry insiders, the good times are not only not over, they’re about to get rolling in earnest.

“This country didn’t just have an economic meltdown; it has had an airline meltdown,” says Andrew Schmertz , who earlier this month put a substantial sum of money where his mouth is by launching Hopscotch Air to provide on-demand air taxi service between metropolitan New York and hundreds of mid-Atlantic and New England community airports.

“Airlines are reducing and, in some cases, canceling service along many routes … the (traveling public) is clamoring for a solution to the airline mess,” Schmertz said. “People still need to fly and time is still money.”

Linear Air CEO Bill Herp who, when interviewed by AirTaxiFlights.com last September believed there was “a big opportunity in efficiently and economically connecting people who live and work near major metro areas with their business interests in secondary and tertiary markets ” has seen nothing in the recent economic crisis to make him change his mind.

Herp is so sanguine about the VLJ/air taxi future that he recently announced formation of Eclipse Services and Support LLC, a co-op venture which hopes to buy certain key Eclipse assets including parts and manuals needed for maintenance and upgrades on current 500s.

More interesting, is the Herp group’s plan to walk away from the Eclipse bankruptcy sale with so-called intellectual property which could include blueprints, engineering documents, computer applications, patent rights and other items that could someday facilitate production of a new Eclipse.

Atlanta-based ImagineAir Co-founder and President Benjamin Hamilton is still another industry insider who sees no reason to revise his company’s mission statement to meet new economic realities.

Interviewed by ATF several months prior to last fall’s stock market crash, Hamilton said “our goal is to use everything the major airlines do wrong as the basis for what we do right. Among other things, that means we are tightly focused on ease of use and customer service. It means we want to offer a fast, easy, personalized and pleasurable flight experience for our customers by removing the hassle and time-intensive processes that plague the airline industry.”

Avoiding the airline industry “plague” like, pardon the pun, the plague has done wonders for ImagineAir’s bottomline … it closed 2008 with a 90 percent increase in sales and a 117 percent rise in flights.

Meanwhile over at Cirrus Design, where the economy has driven production of current piston-engined models down to about 20 percent of pre-crash levels, CEO Brent Wouters remains bullish about the Cirrus Vision single-engine VLJ and affirmed that the Vision is still on target to be certified in late 2011.

According to Wouters’ boss, Cirrus Chairman Alan Klapmeie, the Vision, formerly known as the CirrusJet, will be “easy to learn, intuitive to operate, fun to fly, forgiving and safe as state-of-the-art technology can make them.”

To which Wouter adds this: The Vision is “our future engine of growth.”

And Honda, despite cutting North American automobile production by almost 50 percent in January, celebrated the February opening of its $100 million dollar HondaJet R&D campus in Piedmont, North Carolina by announcing plans to expand the 190,000 square foot facility to 500,000 square feet, starting with construction of a 250,000 manufacturing plant this summer.

Even better, Honda Aircraft CEO & President Michimasa Fujino used the occasion to report that a.) an influx of new orders has forced the company to hike its initial annual production estimate by roughly 30 percent (to about 100 aircraft) and b.) Honda still expects to attain certification and begin deliveries in 2010.

So here’s the good news:

– Quality air-taxi operators who didn’t over-promise and un-deliver on service, who didn’t binge-order aircraft without any idea how they would eventually pay for them, who did devise and follow a market-savvy, sustainable business model are doing well.

– VLJ makers at both end of the price-sticker spectrum — Cirrus with its roughly $1 million Vision and Honda, which has taken over 100 HondaJet orders at just under $4 million per — are optimistic about the future.

And here’s the bad news:

– VLJ air-taxi service will probably not be coming to a community airport near you as soon as you had hoped.

– You will have to continue using scheduled airlines instead of air taxis for awhile and those flights are going to get continually more unpleasant and expensive as airlines deploy ever more tools for draining blood from their stonily suffering passengers. (In fairness to the airlines, rumors that the industry is planning to put parking meters on the washrooms and offer peeping-inclined passengers a $25 fee to watch closed-circuit telecasts from those being used by couples struggling to ravage the smoke detector — or each other — seem to be unfounded.)

Weighing the good news against the bad and comparing the results to the prospects facing other segments of the aviation industry, not to mention the auto, retail, hospitality and consumer electronics industries, one conclusion is inescapable … the air taxi/VLJ business isn’t really doing so bad after all.

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The date is sometime around 2012 and you’re doing a bit of high-intensity lounging somewhere deep in the keys. Warm and wonderfully enjoying the majestic vision of a giant orange ball of a sun slowly descending into the bottomless depths of the Atlantic with a gorgeous 93 percent-naked significant someone of your preferred gender second-skinning against your side.

And this dude comes stumbling over. Not from the left side of the beach, not from the right side of the beach, but from right in front of you — seriously blocking your view of the sunset. He looks kinda like an affluent beachcomber. He’s barefoot and shaggy haired, but his Hawaiian shirt, straw hat, and draw-string beach pants are neither ripped nor worn. Plus he’s clean shaven and pleasantly devoid of bottle brushes of wayward ear and nose hairs.

He smiles, leans toward you and says, quite distinctly, “How’d you like to check up on Fidel for a few hours? Gimme $350 and I’ll take you and your friend over for a visit and some cigars and get you back here in time for the last 30 minutes of Happy Hour at Crabby Dick’s.” He straightens up, broadens his smile, and waits for a response.

You make a quick scan for guys in white coats, but there don’t seem to any. Finally, you say something on the order of “Ah, but I think it’s still illegal to visit Cuba from the states and even if it was legal, there isn’t any room to stuff a thing next to our privates in these minimalist bathing suits so we left our passports back home in Toledo. Even if we did have our passports, we don’t happen to have visas from the Cuban government.”

The intruder’s smile stretches even bigger. “Not to worry,” he says, “we’ll just hop over in my rig, set down in the Bay of Pigs, walk around a bit and come back. Nobody official will ever know we were there or, for that matter, know we left here.”

Welcome to the latest evolution of the air taxi industry, the dawn of the gypsy air cab era. A new age empowered by advanced technology so “disruptive” that it’s difficult to even comprehend it without giggling. A technology so “out there” that it’s almost guaranteed to eventually change the definition of a word that’s been in common usage since at least the days of Queen Victoria.

The word CAB, which future generations may know only as an acronym for Car/Airplane/Boat.

For the dubious blessing this technology will confer upon a somewhat less-than-widely enthusiastically waiting world, we should thank an inventor named Moulton B. Taylor, who built the first — and apparently to date only — FAA-certified flying car (or drivable airplane, if you prefer) back in the mid-’50s. (Note for trivia buffs, Taylor’s Aerocar turned up in some James Bond movie or other a few decades later.)

The second acknowledgment should go to the FAA, which in 2004 created the Sport Pilot license to enable people to take up flying without going through all the tedious learning processes previously required to become a pilot. (Think of it as a rather edgy equivalent to the FAA’s decision to issue Ham radio licenses to folks who just can’t master sending and receiving Morse code.)

Anyway, the FAA decision to create a category of semi-pro pilots seems, at least in theory, to offer the promise of a commercial market for what might otherwise have been strictly experimental aircraft. Several entrepreneurs, therefore, picking up where Moulton Taylor left off, have established companies to build multi-tasking vehicles for the masses.

(In the interests of full disclosure, the triple-play CAR (Car/Airplane/Boat) referenced above is not, at least publically, on anyone’s current production schedule. But it does seem an inevitable refinement of vehicles currently undergoing prototype testing. )

Icon Aircraft’s folding wing Light Sport Aircraft, for example, is a combination trailer, land plane and seaplane. Putting aside silly issues like legalities for the moment, you could hook it up to your car, trailer it to a strip of highway or boat ramp, unhook the trailer hitch, fold out the wings, take off and fly pretty much wherever you wanted as long as you kept under the radar.

In other words, the prototype LSA could — technically speaking — be towed to Florida behind a standard sedan (since it has wheels, it requires no trailer) right now, put into the water in the Keys, taxi to the shore of our mythical beach, pick you up, and land you in the Bay of Pigs in about 40 minutes. The only part of our scenario it can’t perform is taking you, your pilot and a companion because the current prototype only holds two people. (But you can always become your own pilot — Icon says you can learn to fly the LSA in a mere two weeks.)

The Terrafugia Transition is another twin-mode vehicle that could someday spark development of a true “CAR.” Called a “roadable aircraft” by its developers, the Transition is a front-wheel drive automobile that can also fly at over 110 miles per hour (ground speed in car mode has not yet been established, apparently.)

Perhaps the neatest thing about the Transition is that stowing its folding wings for road use and deploying them for flight is controlled from inside the cabin by an automatic electromechanical system.

“This unique functionality,” Terrafugia says, “addresses head-on the issues faced by today’s private and sport pilots.”

Perhaps so, but it does seem to us that deploying the wings and getting off the ground fast enough to avoid a “head-on” with an oncoming semi would require something more like a catapult-launched F14 than an LSA with a 100 horsepower Rotax engine.

Be that as it may, you’re probably sitting in front of your computer thinking that the original premise of this post is pretty stupid. That Sport Pilot license holders can’t operate air taxi services with LSA equipment. That requires things like Part 135 certifications and commercial pilots licenses.

The truth is we agree with you. The idea is pretty silly. Outrageously stupid, even. Air taxi operators have to have all kinds of expensive, hard-to-obtain licenses. Just like hack drivers in every major city from New York west to the Pacific do.

Or did … until all those gypsy cabs started picking up passengers everywhere from Old Broadway to New Market Street.

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“We wanted a plane with which we could entertain our family and friends … I had the most fun in years while flying it during training in Texas and in Brazil…”
– Houston businesswoman (real estate and mineral rights) and Certified Flight Instructor Elizabeth Frost, co-owner, with her husband, of Embraer Phenom 100 S/N 008

Driving an emphatic nail into the coffin of what had, no matter how hard one tried to sugarcoat it, been a dismal 12 months in the brief history of the VLJ and air-taxi industries, Embraer rang in the new year with the U.S. arrival of Phenom 100 #008 on New Year’s Eve following a flawless flight from the factory in São José dos Campos, Brazil.

Like the Cessna Citation Mustang, the approximately $3.1 million Phenom — which was fittingly delivered to its new parents, James and Elizabeth Frost, in Brazil on Christmas Eve — arrived on the scene as a fully formed, 100 percent FAA-certified aircraft cleared to operate in known icing conditions and without any avionics restrictions.

And if that weren’t good news enough, Embraer reports that a.) many of the operational specs promised when the program was announced in 2005 have been exceeded and that b.) orders, especially North American orders, have been so strong it is expanding its U.S. manufacturing facilities with a new Florida finishing and assembly plant that should be employing about 200 people and turning out almost ten aircraft (100s and the upcoming Phenom 300) by sometime next year.

Point to ponder: The Phenom 100, first VLJ to break the $3 million price barrier, is apparently selling briskly everywhere from Switzerland to Spain to the U.S. despite the world economic decline. This augers extremely well for the approximately $3.5-3.8 million HondaJet when it takes wing in a hopefully better economy sometime in 2010.

So “who” exactly is Embraer and what has it wrought?

Like its new VLJ, Embraer — Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica, S. A., to be formal — is a true phenom, a multinational industrial giant in a country not exactly famous for heavy-industry and high-tech manufacturing.

Founded in 1969 by the Brazilian Air Ministry and privatized in 1994, Embraer employs more than 20,000 people, had revenues of over $4.5 billion (all amounts in U.S. dollars) in the first nine months of 2008 and a $21.6 billion firm-order backlog as of November. Even better (and somewhat unusual in today’s aviation industry), Embraer turned a profit — $277 million — in its latest reporting period, January-October, 2008.

Primarily a builder of commercial jetliners, Embraer’s North American fleet customers include JetBlue, US Airways, Air Canada, Continental, Republic, Aeromexico, Delta and Northwest Airlink.

So much for what Hollywood calls the “back story.” Let’s get on to the aircraft.

In 2005, Embraer promised that the Pratt & Whitney-powered Phenom 100 would hoist a payload of 3,384 pounds including six people (passengers and pilots) — in standard configuration (eight with the lavatory removed), cruise at 41,000 feet, fly 1150 nautical miles at a maximum speed of 380 knots with four aboard, and land on a 3,000-foot runway.

As certified and delivered, the 100, sports twin P&W Canada PW617F-E engines delivering 1695 pounds of thrust each, tops out at 390 knots, can land on a 2700-foot strip, and offers up to 300NM more range (relative to its design specifications) when operating from airports with high temperature or elevations restrictions.

It will also climb directly to 41,000 feet at maximum takeoff weight and slightly betters its original fuel efficiency targets.

The aircraft’s avionics package is every bit as impressive as its operating specs. A customized version of Garmin’s all-glass Prodigy G1000 flight deck, the Phenom gives pilots access to three 12-inch high-definition, sunlight readable LCDs (two primary flight displays and one multifunction display.) Between them the three screens integrate and display primary flight, communications and weather data, navigation and terrain information, and engine instrument readings and warnings.

Raw data for the system is provided by a mode-S traffic information transponder, a terrain-awareness system, omni-directional-scanning digital weather radar, a satellite radio weather link and dual-radio transceivers. A Garmin GFC700 autopilot and twin RVSM-compliant air-data computers enable automatic control of pitch trim, speed trim and yaw.

And if all that, somehow, isn’t enough cutting-edge technology to impress you out of your socks, consider this: The Phenom 100’s 11′ long, 5′1″ wide cabin is illuminated by (you’d better sit down for this) state-of-the-art LED light bulbs. The interior, designed by the BMW Group’s DesignworksUSA studio, also features 4′ 11″ of headroom and 55 cubic feet of cargo space divided into two compartments.

No question about it, the Phenom 100 stretches the definition of Very Light Jet. At 10,472 pounds, its Maximum Takeoff Weight (MTOW) is almost 2,000 pounds more than that of the world’s only other in-commercial-production VLJ, Cessna’s Mustang — which may account for Embraer marketing it as an “entry level” executive jet rather than a Very Light Jet. (The Phenom’s MTOW, however, is still only about 50 percent that of the quintessential executive jet, the Lear 40.)

All in all, Embraer seems to have so far done everything right in bringing the Phenom 100 to market, including spending a reported $100 million to establish a worldwide parts, customer service and maintenance tracking system. Technician training began last August, pilot training kicked off in September and owner/pilots of the first 100 Phenoms scheduled for delivery had all passed their FAA practical test by the time the Frost’s took delivery of #008 at Christmas.

To put it in really simple terms, it seems to us that the executives at Embraer, like those at Cessna before it, had more than an idea … they had a plan. Most of the pure “idea guys,” brilliant as they and their concepts were, have already quit the game and left the playing field to the planners.

Which is probably a very good thing for the future of both the VLJ and the air-taxi industries.

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“We’re a software and logistics company that only happens to be making money flying planes.”
– DayJet founder and CEO Ed Iacobucci as quoted in Fast Company magazine, May 2007 (emphasis added)

Maybe the ego behind that statement — not the economy’s negative effect on the capital market, not the alleged failures of the Eclipse 500 — was the real factor in DayJet’s demise. Maybe that elitist mindset, the arrogance that drives a CEO to boast that his company is “making money flying planes” months before it sells its first seat, was what really killed DayJet.

Or maybe not. Maybe Mr. Iacobucci was correct when he said that DayJet’s failure to obtain an additional $5 million in bridge financing was the reason for the September shutdown and subsequent bankruptcy filing.

Maybe his after-the-fall statement that “during the past year, we have demonstrated, beyond a reasonable doubt, that customers will sign up, purchase and become frequent users of this new service — the DayJet ‘per-seat, on-demand’ model works” was dead accurate.

Or, again, maybe not.

We say “maybe not” because Iacobucci, in a moment of apparent candor, later admitted to Jennifer Harrington of Aviation International News that DayJet had only been selling an average of 15 seats per day after almost a full year in business.

“If we had gotten 30 to 35 tickets a day, we would have been OK,” he told Ms. Harrington.

Hhhmmm. At the time, DayJet owned a fleet of 28 Eclipse 500s with a total of more than 100 passenger seats (had they all been in service at the same time, which they never were) and claimed to serve approximately 45 community airports throughout the Southeast. It also had, according to its bankruptcy petition, about $4 million in liabilities.

According to public records, DayJet raised somewhere in excess of $250,000,000 during its brief lifespan. It was, the company bragged in one press release, “among the best capitalized pre-operational passenger air carriers in U.S. aviation history and the largest in the on-demand sector.”

Could the addition of 20 more fares per day possibly have produced a survivable return on an investment of that magnitude?

Given that a significant portion of that $250,000,000, including more than $500,000 spent on political lobbying, was invested in making sure a majority of humans from Alaska to the Amazon recognized the word “DayJet” what went wrong?

Why were only 15 people a day taking advantage of the opportunity to “Fly On Demand?” Surely there was something more seriously askew than the fact that FAA regulations differentiating air taxi services from scheduled airlines prohibited DayJet from actually flying on demand. Even flying “somewhat on demand” (within a window of a couple of hours) should have produced more daily passengers than 15.

Maybe the real issue, as some observers have speculated, was a basic misunderstanding of the business-to-business nature of the air-taxi market on the part of DayJet’s marketing gurus.

Forgive us a brief digression …

Roughly ten years ago, Panasonic entered the rugged portable computer market with its first Toughbook model. Panasonic Portable Computer Company (P2C2), as it was then called, was a ground-level startup from a company with zero presence in the U.S. computer market.

In launching Toughbook, Panasonic spent somewhere between zero and virtually nothing on advertising. What they did invest in was the most obsessive-compulsive, bloodthirsty, workaholic sales force in the B2B technology jungle.

They hired people who left their homes before dawn every Monday and returned shortly before or after midnight every Saturday. While gone, they spent every day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. pitching enterprise IT managers and chief financial officers and every evening from 6 p.m. til the wee hours drinking with those same executives.

If you knew what to look for you could easily spot them waiting for the airport shuttle the morning after one of those marathon sales days. They were the people with the sharpest clothes, straightest ties and shiniest shoes hanging around the hotel lobby at 6 a.m.

Five years after launch, Panasonic’s total market share was more than 50 percent, its share of the law-enforcement market was over 70 percent and its profit margin topped 30 percent in an industry where an 8 or 9 percent margin was considered excellent.

Today, competing against such well established companies as Dell and General Dynamics, Toughbooks have a high 60-something percent total market share and more than 90 percent of the law-enforcement market.

The point is, P2C2’s managers understood B2B selling. They knew that at the end of the day most corporate buying decisions aren’t about product or even about price. They’re about return on investment and productivity.

Did DayJet understand this? Did its executives realize that the only way to make their airline fly was on the wings of hundreds — and eventually thousands — of business travelers? Were they aware that the subjects of untold thousands of bad corporate jokes — the so-called “bean counters” — could have cared less about the number of $2 million aircraft DayJet had on order (about 1400) or the hoopla and political pontifications that frequently accompanied each DayPort announcement?

Did DayJet devote enough of its $250,000,000 to wooing CFOs, sales and field force supervisors, office managers at law and accountancy firms and other key players charged with decided when, where and how other executives travel?

DayJet — like the rest of the air-taxi industry — had a great B2B story to tell. Changing a two-day trip into a one-day turnaround and a full-day sales call into a half-day visit increases productivity and return on investment in almost direct relationship to the amount of time saved and substantially decreases TCOT (Total Cost of Transportation).
Those are the kind of financial realities virtually guaranteed to warm the heart of any executive faced with initialing hundreds — or even dozens — of monthly travel vouchers. The question is whether DayJet took those facts and ran with them. Ran with them into conference rooms, executive suites, corporate dining rooms, and trade show workshops?

The evidence — the shocking 15-tickets-a-day evidence — indicates that it did not.

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London, June 25 — The prospectus of the company which is to give to New York its motor cab service has just been issued. The concern is to be called the New York Motor Cab Company Limited. It is organized under the English laws and has a capital of £303,000 dividing into 300,000 preferred participating ordinary shares of £1 each and 60,000 deferred shares of 1s. each.
— by special cablegram to The New York Times, June 26, 1907

As it happened, the New York Motor Cab Company Limited never did operate any taxis in the Big Apple. Before it could load even its first Renault on a steamer bound for the New World, it was absorbed by Harry N. Allen, a N.Y. entrepreneur (he and his brother were the East Coast distributors of Mercedes and De Dietrich cars.)

Allen took a bit of the French word taximetres (the trade name of a French product used to calculate horse cab fares), added the last syllable of motorcab, a word frequently used by British and other European automobile transportation providers, and copyrighted his creation as taxicab. Not surprisingly, he named his new firm the New York Taxicab Company.

Beginning with 65 16-horsepower French-made Darracqs in late 2007, almost 100 years to the day before America’s first VLJ air taxi took flight, Allen’s cab company eventually operated more than 600 bright red hacks on the streets and avenues between the Bronx and the Battery. (Legends that New York Taxicab was the first company to paint taxis yellow are unsupported in contemporary accounts. That honor apparently goes to John D. Hertz, who entered the cab business in 1910; 98 years later the identical yellow is still the official color of one of John D’s later endeavors, Hertz Car Rental.)

Rapid expansion or not, Allen’s company was toast by about 1911, a victim of labor unrest, competition from companies like Hertz’ Yellow Cab and Morris Markin’s Checker and, perhaps (the historical record is unclear on this), undercapitalization.

The firm was started with $3 million Allen raised from international venture capitalists and this might simply have not been enough to fuel growth, weather strikes and survive the cut-throat pricing that came with new companies entering the market.

Does the moral of this story about America’s first motorized ground taxi operator have any applicability to DayJet, America’s first airVLJ taxi service, filing a Chapter 7 liquidation petition on November 14? (One day, coincidentally after DayJet’s embattled aircraft supplier, Eclipse Aviation, missed making payroll — a shortfall made good the following week.)

You bet it does. Because the moral is that first guys (like the proverbial “nice” ones) sometimes finish last. Lewis and Clark, as it happens, made it back from their monumental “Journey of Discovery.” Many other pioneers, in business as well as wilderness treks, are not so lucky.

Take Ferdinand Magellan, the world famous Portuguese explorer widely credited with being the first man to circumnavigate the globe. Which he might well have become except for one little mishap.

After 18 months at sea, after having successfully put down a mutiny by three of the five captains under his command (all of whom he executed), after surviving the scurvy and starvation that claimed many of his crew during their four-month crossing of the Pacific, Magellan was killed trying to intervene in a skirmish between rival bands of warring tribesmen. The captain with the distinction of leading the two ships and handful of survivors of the Magellan expedition back to Spain to complete the first circumnavigation of the globe was Juan Sebastian del Cano, who apparently had the good sense to stay out of “domestic disputes” while anchored among what three hundred years later would be known as the Philippine Islands.

Or consider brothers Frank and Charles Duryea. Their 1896 startup, the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, was the first American automobile company. The initial model featured a one-cylinder engine and a three-speed transmission that propelled it down the wagon trails of the day at almost eight miles an hour.

Going into what can honestly be described, in terms of the auto industry as it existed in the 1890s, mass production, they managed to clone 13 of the cars — virtually identical and featuring largely interchangeable parts — before their investors turned off the tap and forced the company’s sale.

More recently there was Adam Osborne, who, among many other things, invented the portable — fondly dubbed the “luggable” because of its 28-pound form factor — computer and the bundled software package. When he died in Kodaikanal, India, not far from where he was born 64 years earlier, in 2003 almost no one in the technology or business worlds paused for an instant in homage or even remembrance.

Pioneers, inventors, visionaries. Many, such as Adam Osborne, sink like a stone in the seas of history. Others — the Edisons, the Columbuses, the Wright Brothers, the Salks — leave historical records engraved on the same rocky substance. A third group, which includes the likes of Ferdinand Magellan, never live to complete the journeys for which they later become famous.

But no matter how history eventually treats the New York Taxicab companies and Osborne Computer companies of the 20th Century and the DayJets and Eclipses of the 21st, the innovations they forged, the hidden passages they uncovered, the unknown seas they charted, were and are all pathways to a better tomorrow.

As for Vern Rayburn and Ed Iacobucci, the prophets — respectively — behind Eclipse and DayJet, perhaps they can find some small solace in the words of Adam Osborne: The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake — you can’t learn anything from being perfect.

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The state of Montana is justifiably proud of its reputation as “Big Sky” country, but the truth is that a huge sky covers every square inch of Planet Earth’s eternally spinning globe and — DayJet’s failure notwithstanding — there are an ever-increasing number of air-taxi operators, VLJ factories, and related businesses operating in or, in the case of manufacturers, FBOs, airports, ground transportation companies, etc., beneath it.

This reality, which sometimes gets lost in the thicket of U.S. air-taxi and VLJ news we encounter every day, came back on our radar front and center recently when the Russian state bank, Vnesheconombank (VEB), chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, agreed to provide 100 percent financing for construction of an Eclipse 500 assembly plant near Ulyanovsk, a city in Central European Russia best known as the birthplace of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

In return for putting up the estimated $205 million (USD) needed to build the factory, VEB and the Ulyanovsk government will become shareholders in the new Russian Eclipse subsidiary. Aside from the image of Ulyanovsk’s most famous son rattling the masonry in his Moscow tomb at the thought of the state bank trading rubles, or gold, or even dollars for stock certificates, the most interesting news bit in this transaction is about production, not money.

Specifically, Eclipse has projected a production rate of 800 airframes a year, commencing on opening day in 2010. Contrast that with Eclipse production in Albuquerque, which is expected to be less than 200 in 2008 and under 500 in 2009, and several things become immediately apparent.

1. With both the state bank and a national president with virtually dictatorial powers (lest we forget, Putin has totally dissed the elected assembly as cavalierly as any czar when politically expedient) behind it, Eclipse is probably not nearly as concerned about financing as it would be if it were trying to engineer a major ramp-up in the U.S.A.

2. Labor is cheaper in Russia and will probably be fairly docile (part of the deal calls for the local “authorities” to assist in recruiting workers … ).

3. The 500s to be built in Russia are intended solely for markets outside the U.S. None of them are expected to be sold or flown in North America, which makes them exempt from FAA regulations. (An essentially meaningless technicality, since European Union air-worthiness and operating regulations are just as tough, more so in some areas, than the FAA’s.)

4. This is the biggie, however. Eclipse is planning to build more aircraft in Russia than in America because its management team obviously believes the world market for its aircraft is going to be — for at least the foreseeable future — more robust than the U.S. market.

It would be easy, too easy, to dispute the decision to emphasize the world rather than the U.S. market by pointing out that the new top kick at Eclipse, Roel Pieper, is a Dutchman who now lives in France and has spent his entire career in Europe — most recently as founder and chairman of ETIRC Aviation.

ETIRC describes itself as “the principal driver of the VLJ industry in Europe, enabling jet networks for airlines and aviation entrepreneurs across the continent … (with a) new model … intelligently blending two recent advances in technology: Very Light Jets and real time operations technology.”

Well, okay, that’s the high concept part. Here on earth, one of the things Pieper did shortly after forming ETRIC was negotiate a contract making it the principal distributor of Eclipse 500s in Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Commonwealth Independent States (CIS), a federation of countries formerly part of the Soviet Union.

Later, when Eclipse needed some funding ETIRC provided it. Still later, when Eclipse needed still more cash, Pieper deposed Vern Raburn and took over (apparently, to be fair, somewhat reluctantly) the chairmanship.

So maybe Pieper is biased in favor of European business. As recently as the last week of September he told the press that the European Eclipse “order book is at least as big, if not bigger, than in the U.S.”

And that’s just the European book. Air-taxi service and corporate VLJs are now flying, or soon will be, everywhere from Bogota to Beijing, Delhi to Djakarta, and Hanoi to Hong Kong. (The Northern Air Service taxi between Hanoi and Ha Long sidesteps the debate over VLJ vs. piston aircraft by using EC130 B4 helicopters.) And then there’s Russia, partially located in Europe and partially in Asia. Presumably, Eclipse sales to the latter section go into the non-European “book.”

In addition to his own intelligence guided by experience, Pieper can look to external factors to back his contention that the global market is driving VLJ sales.

There is, for example, the experience of Cessna, Eclipse’s chief competitor, particularly in England and Western Europe where more air-taxi operators have opted for the Mustang than the 500. In an exclusive AirTaxiFlights.com interview earlier this year, Cessna Program Manager David Dell noted that 75 percent of the Mustang orders booked in 2007 were international.

“I am,” Dell said, “actually kind of surprised by the ratio of international to domestic orders.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have been … bad as gas prices are, as much as they hurt and embitter us, there are still more than 40 countries in the world with fuel prices higher than ours and most of the highest pump prices ($8 to $9 a gallon) are in Europe.

If there are good reasons for American business travelers to switch to VLJ air taxis from traditional light-jet charters because avgas costs have driven charter rates beyond the pale, there are better reasons (two or three or four dollars a gallon better) for Europeans to do so. The same is true for decommissioning a Lear in favor of a VLJ. If it makes sense for U.S. corporations to do it, it makes even more sense for European companies.

There is also the “Detroit” factor. Americans may no longer lust for the latest SUVs and full-size pickups from Ford, GM and Chrysler, but we still love our cars and the freedom of driving from city to city and getting as close to our destination as the parking laws allow.

Europe and Japan are different. Over there major city pairs are connected by high-speed trains that often better scheduled airlines’ city-center-to-city-center transit times. Many business travelers “across the Pond” would never dream of driving or taking a scheduled airline between, say, Paris and Lyon. The train is faster, cheaper and more convenient.

But there’s a kicker. In many places the train’s not nearly as convenient as it used to be. The new Central Bahnhof (railroad station) in Berlin, for example, is a 750,000-square-foot complex with trains on four levels connected by 54 escalators and 49 elevators. Fighting through and making connections between trains of the seven railroads and hundreds of cities the Bahnhof serves can be as daunting and pulse-pounding as racing from concourse to concourse at Atlanta-Hartsfield or O’Hare.

Compared to Nagoya Station’s 4.8 million square feet, of course, Berlin’s Central is a piker. And Nagoya, the biggest railroad station in the world, doesn’t even handle that many people — only about 1.1 million per day. Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, one of five Japanese depots topping over a million passengers a day, serves well over 3.5 million travelers every 24 hours. By contrast, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International , the world’s busiest passenger airport, emplanes and deplanes a “mere” 244,900 paying customers on an average day.

What’s happening in many European and Asian big-city train stations is exactly what’s happening in many major airports: the process of public transportation is getting increasingly less user-friendly. Which causes people to look for an alternative … an alternative that happens to fit in with their culture and habits.

For people whose culture is not umbilical-corded to the private automobile, the alternative could be air-taxi service.

Passengers unhappy wearing out their Nikes trudging through Berlin’s Central Bahnhof, for example, can fly point-to-point to roughly 600 European cities without experiencing a bit of Berlin-Templhof International Airport madness … air-taxi operators serve four convenient small airports on different sides of the city.

Likewise, Londoners traveling in England and or to Western Europe can escape the world-famous Heathrow Horrors by jumping on an air taxi at stress-free airports like Northolt and Biggin Field.

Eclipse 500s rolling off assembly lines in Russia. Cessna Mustangs taking off from places with quaint names like Biggin Field. Hong Kong plutocrats parking their Lears and stepping aboard VLJs. What’s it all about?

How does “proud to be an American” sound? Because in one way, that’s exactly what it is about. We may have missed the boat — 50 or 60 years ago — on inventing the compact, fuel-efficient sedan, but we did invent the compact fuel-efficient jet airplane. Sam Williams and Tony Fox and Vern Raburn and untold hundreds of other dreamers and doers designed, built and taught the Very Light Jet airplane to fly right here in the U.S.A.

So, if you happen to visit France or Spain or Monaco and decide to do a little country hopping on one of Blink or London Executive Aviation’s Mustangs, take a moment to reflect on the fact that you’re enjoying a uniquely American experience … one with an unbroken heritage of innovation going all the way back to Wilbur and Orville Wright.

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Not long before its September 2007 launch, DayJet’s than director of corporate communications, Vicki Harris, told AirTaxiFlights.com that “By the end of our first operational year we should have 20 DayPorts in at least four states.” (A New Day(Jet) Is Dawning)

The good news is DayJet exceeded that expectation by 300 percent, ending its first operational year with service to approximately 60 airports. The bad news is that less than three weeks after celebrating that first anniversary, DayJet abruptly ceased operations, fired virtually all its employees, told pre-paid ticket holders and members seeking refunds to go fly the ultimate ultra-light aircraft — aka a kite — and left at least one FAA spokesperson noting that it really would have been nice if the company had notified the agency before abandoning ship.

Given the nature of the DayJet saga, which in retrospect seems like an endless series of triumphant firsts and service expansions punctuated by fund-raising failures, observers can be excused for wondering if the financial meltdown which erased Dayjet from the skies is merely a negative blip in a generally upward-climbing graph or a harbinger of a systemic problem in the VLJ segment of the air-taxi industry.

Trying to answer any questions about DayJet with the body still warm and the post mortems barely begun is, of course, an exercise in pure guesswork, but it does seem like the real culprit may have been a business plan calling for an unsustainable rate of growth fueled by essentially unlimited amounts of venture capital.

Or maybe the model, written over half a decade ago, wasn’t flawed. Maybe the fault lies with company directors and executives unwilling or unable to modify a bull market-based business plan totally unsuitable for an economy in which venture capital is almost as scarce as major oil deposits in Rhode Island.

Maybe DayJet’s failure was based on something even more simple, a corporate culture developed in the pre-dot.com collapse, late-’90s, high-tech go-go days in which DayJet founder Ed Iacobucci made his “bones.”

A corporate culture which believed that companies which can fly needn’t bother learning to walk before they run. Which believed 60 DayPorts were better than 20 even when each new pushpin puncturing the system map generated more red ink on the bottomline of the ledger. Which believed growth was more important than profit and that issues like not having enough aircraft or money to support that growth were irrelevant.

But enough carping. To steal one of Shakespeare’s most over-quoted lines, we come not to bury Ed Iacobucci but to praise him. Like his recently deposed counterpart at Eclipse, Vern Rayburn, Iacobucci is a visionary without whom the development of a highly flexible, cost-effective, jet-powered American air-taxi industry might have been delayed by decades, if not generations.

Like Edison frantically searching for a better way to banish the night, Iacobucci and Rayburn were visionaries fixated on offering business travelers like themselves an escape from the seven rings of airline hell. Both men were dreamers in a hurry who shared a common background in computer technology, where the line in the sand between customers and beta testers is notoriously invisible (as any early adopter of a new Microsoft operating system can attest.)

Aviation is different. New aircraft all have teething problems (just check out the history of the de Havilland Comet, for example), but the post-delivery criticism of the only non-Eclipse FAA-certified VLJ, the Cessna Mustang, has been almost silent compared to the sound and fury accompanying such Eclipse issues as revolving-door avionics suppliers.

The difference is that Cessna is old-school in their approach to bringing product to market; its standard operating procedures were written in the Iron Age. Eclipse’s business rules were developed in the Silicon Age, where everything happens at hyperspace speeds. Which reminds us, since the Mustang did, in fact, achieve FAA certification before the Eclipse 500, that even in the 21st Century the tortoise frequently outruns the hare.

In the DayJet case, a slew of more conservative VLJ air-taxi operators throughout the United States, Europe and various other corners of the globe are doing just fine, thank you, by adding planes and routes incrementally as cash flow, seat demand and common sense dictate.

These companies, the air-taxi operators who haven’t been grabbing the headlines for the past couple of years, are the turtles in this particular race and as in the classic fable they are now passing and pulling away from the stranded hare. But let us not forget that had it not been for Ed Iacobucci’s hare setting the pace and blazing the trail, many of the turtles might never have started at all.

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One side note, before figuratively scattering DayJet’s ashes to the wind, we should consider the possibility that the little airline which showed the world that pay-per-seat microjet service could work operationally and might work fiscally in the right time and place may yet live to fly another day.

As of this writing, DayJet had not surrendered its operating certificate to the FAA and until that happens if could, at least in theory, resume service as soon as someone — perhaps even a major air carrier interested in hedging its bets for the future — writes a check large enough to buy some avgas, pay a few pilots and cover the accrued interest on the aircraft fleet.

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Count us among the many who really don’t know much about what’s happening at Eclipse beyond the fact that company founder and visionary Vern Raburn has moved, voluntarily or not, out of the left hand seat and venture capitalist Roel Pieper, who has been serving as vice-chairman since his Netherlands-based ETIRC Aviation became the majority shareholder in Eclipse last January, has slid into it.

One the thing is certain, changes are in store for what is to this point the world’s most prolific manufacturer of Very Light Jet aircraft.

Some of these changes — such as the likelihood that Pieper’s ascendency and his ties to deep-pocket European investors will improve Eclipse’s financial status at a time when big-money wells in the U.S. have largely gone dry — will be cheered by air taxi operators, current private Eclipse owners, and everyone holding future Eclipse 500 delivery positions.

Other changes Pieper hinted at — a projected decrease in research and development spending and the possible first-trimester abortion of the single-engine Eclipse 400 project — will more likely, if they become reality, be damned.

“Clearly, there are some issues at Eclipse. A whole bunch of things that need to be looked at,” Pieper told Flight Daily News in a July 27 interview. “You can assume I have the courage to make the changes … we’re probably going to slow down on development, do fewer things.”

While Pieper didn’t flat-out say the Eclipse 400 was as dead as the Northrup Flying Wing, he did say that no final decision on going forward with it would be made until November despite the fact that approximately 100 orders and deposits for the under-$1.5 million four-seater have been accepted.

(Idle question: Will the people who traded their Eclipse 500 order positions for Eclipse 400 order slots get their old positions back if the 400 is canceled or will they be moved to the back of the line?)

The announcement of Raburn’s resignation and Pieper’s appointment as CEO was accompanied by the news that ETIRC was making a second, amount unspecified, investment in Eclipse and that this second round of financing, added to the $100 million ETIRC invested in January and price hikes that bring the cost of a new 500 to about $ 2.1 million, would bring Eclipse to the breakeven point in early 2009 and enable it to reach profitability once production and deliveries increase from the current average of about six aircraft a week to approximately 12.

So that, plus a deal to have 500s built in Russia for the Euro market, is what’s happening with Eclipse.
But what about Vern Raburn, the man whose dreams of a better way to flit from Point A to Point B made so many of us begin to look at the sky from a whole new, refreshingly exciting, point of view?

Confirming, according to Aero-News Net reports, that he was forced out under threat of ETIRC cancelling the promised second round of financing if he stayed,” Raburn noted that “these things happen in business” and said he was “pleased” Pieper is “deeply committed” to Eclipse’s “ongoing success.”

As for his own future plans, Raburn, who some reports claim will become vice-chairman of an ETIRC subsidiary that manages air taxi services in places like Turkey and Russia, said he planned to leave Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where his abdication was announced during AirVenture 2008, and “go fishing for a week.”

Pieper, for his part, observed that “maybe two years ago he (Vern) said, ‘maybe I shouldn’t be CEO.’”

Which he may very well have done. And he may very well have been right. Eclipse, like any pioneer, has had its problems, ranging from playing musical chairs with avionics suppliers to unseemly delays in obtaining known-icing certification and delivering on promised instrument upgrades and functionality.

And maybe, as Pieper seemed to be indicating without actually saying so, some of these types of issues, things that are bound to come up whenever a company is more or less inventing a new industry, could have been handled better by a chief executive whose face was buried in the bottomline instead of tilted toward the sun.

Maybe so, but that ignores the larger truth. Which is that without an entrepreneur like Vern Raburn there would have been no Eclipse Aviation for Roel Pieper and ETIRC to swallow up and hopefully make wildly profitable. Without Vern Raburn, the VLJ Age — inevitable as it was — might still be on the horizon instead of already happening on a daily basis at hundreds — if not thousands — of airports from Moscow, Russia to Moscow, Idaho.

History, and all of us fascinated by flying machines should remember that while it was Sam Williams who invented the ultra-lightweight turbofan engine and Tony Fox who first proposed building a personal aircraft around those engines, it took Vern Raburn to actually lasso what he liked to call the “disruptive technology” of the Very Light Jet and tame it into an elegant, efficient, uniquely 21st Century form of public and private transportation.

Enjoy the fishing vacation, Vern, you’ve earned it.

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