Not too many people except for professional musicians remember Les Paul and even most pickers recall him best as the man who pretty much invented, developed, perfected and popularized the electric guitar. (Many guitarists also remember Paul’s wizardry at winding up ultra-hot induction coils that no one else has ever been able to match.) Not as well remembered is the fact that Les Paul, who turns 93 in June, also invented — or at least commercially tamed — multi-track recording and that he was arguably one of the greatest guitarists, regardless of type, who ever lived and the only guitarist who ever lived to earn two Grammys at the age of 90. Or that he and his than wife Mary Ford were one of the top recording duos in the music business in the 1940s and ’50s.

Of all the things that are least remembered about Les Paul and Mary Ford, commercial jingles quite possibly head the list. While you may have heard some of their classics like “Tennessee Waltz” or ” Vaya con Dio” on XM or Sirius or even a terrestrial oldies station, the odds are strong that neither you, nor most everybody else still alive, has heard their wonderful spots for such long-gone promotions as Miss Reingold Beer (”Vote, Vote for Miss Reingold … ) unless you happen to own one of several excellent Les Paul CD boxed collections.

But if you do own the CDs, you’ve probably heard the cute ditties Les and Mary did for Robert Hall Clothes: When the values go up, up, up and the prices go down, down, down.

Nobody’s singing about it yet (moaning, yes, singing, no) but the airline industry — which seems to specialize in getting things backwards these days — is doing a magnificent job of reversing that particular jingle into “when the prices go up, up, up and the values go down, down, down.”

In the process, they are rapidly escalating the day when a customized just-for-you, fly-on-demand air-taxi flight might be more than just cost effective compared to a major airline trip, it might actually — taking into account getting to and from distant airports, scheduling problems requiring otherwise unnecessary overnight stays, etc. — be cheaper.

Here’s why. Many airlines, if not most, are using the reality of record oil prices as a scapegoat for a greedy attempt to generate excess revenue to cover the mounting losses caused by a decade or more of gross — or in some case virtually malignant — mismanagement.

Here’s a very rough example (rough because the 757, like most airliners, comes in numerous configurations and gross weights).

– Rough fact one: A Boeing 757 consumes about 2.5 gallons of jet fuel per mile and carries around 210 passengers.
– Rough fact two: A typical air taxi flight is anywhere from 200 to 300 miles.
– Rough fact three: A 757 uses about 750 gallons of jet fuel to fly 300 miles.
– Rough fact four: In April 2008, according to American Airlines, jet fuel was about 89 cents per gallon higher than in April 2007.
– Rough fact five: Per ticket airline fuel surcharges and other forms of fare increases that the airlines blame on rising fuel costs average $15 (conservatively) per one-way ticket where applied.
– Rough fact six: Airline raw passengers counts may be down, but load factors are almost unbelievably high. AirTaxiFlights.com’s hometown airline, Delta, reported system wide loadings of over 83 percent in March and many other U.S. airlines are also flying with their aircraft more than 80 percent full on average.

Let’s do the math. Our “typical’ 757 uses 750 gallons of fuel to fly 300 miles, which is costing the airlines an extra $670 relative to last year. If the plane is 80 percent full and each of the 168 passengers pays even a ten dollar fuel surcharge that’s over $1600 in the airline’s pocket, a $900 markup over the actual increased fuel charge. Even if the plane takes off half empty, the airline makes a $300 profit on the fuel “surcharge.”

(Note: Profiteering from surcharges is not a practice limited to U.S. airlines. As this was being written, British Airlines and Virgin Airlines settled long-standing legal actions by admitted to fuel charge price fixing and overcharging and agreeing to refund over $200 million in bogus fuel surcharges to passengers.)

But that’s just part of the story. The rest of the tale has to do with what could be called the “movie theater effect.” You take a date and a hundred dollars to a movie. The tickets are nine dollars each. You leave without enough money left to stop for a drink on your way to your place or hers/his.

That’s the movie theater effect or, just as accurately, the pickpocket business model.

Whatever it is, the airlines love it. It’s the philosophy behind everything from surcharges on tickets purchased directly from airline-employees over the phone or at airline ticket counters (yes, almost unbelievably, Alaska Air and others are charging you extra for the privilege of buying a ticket directly from them instead of Expedia), to $25 to $50 checked baggage fees, to curbside check-in charges, to “handling” charges on frequent flier redemptions (thanks, Delta!).

What’s next? Paying for peanuts per shell, with a minimum purchase requirement of three pounds? C oin slots on the toilets? With a dual-occupancy surcharge for Mile High Club members?

Whatever it is, whatever strategy the airlines have in mind to help them drive their fists deeper into your pocket, the chances are excellent that it won’t ever be part of the Air Taxi Experience.

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Do it yourself air travel. Sounds good doesn’t it. Wiggling your head into that well-used, sun-bleached-leather Red Baron helmet, lowering the goggles, pushing the spark advance button, gesturing for your field mechanic to spin the prop, listening for someone to bellow “clear,” releasing the brake and slowly rolling down a beautiful green grassy strip toward the wide blue yonder.

Yes, well. Perhaps it sounds better than it was. Those old OX-5-powered Jenny biplanes were real bone-shakers and the picturesque leather helmets weren’t nearly the equal of fiberglass or Nomex when it came to protecting open-cockpit pilots from boiling hot castor oil escaping from the engine nacelle and streaming back over the fuselage.

These days flying-it-yourself is a lot more pleasant … neither helmets nor goggles are required in today’s closed-cockpit airplanes, engines are equipped with electric starters, and modern private aircraft — even the smallest single-engine ones — move through the air a lot more smoothly than the family sedan bumping over one of the more rotted out sections of our rapidly being reclaimed by nature interstate highway system.

Today’s Red Barons on vacation don’t even have to pack a pot of glue to paste down the linen wing and frame coverings that almost inevitably loosened and started flapping during each flight. And instead of carrying a parachute on your back, you can purchase an airplane with a frame-mounted chute that will float you and your passengers safely to the ground if something untoward, like an engine failure, occurs.

That’s the upside of do-it-yourself air travel. The downside is that it still, until recently, required a substantial commitment of time, money, effort, and concentration. It also requires — despite what some general aviation flag-wavers have been saying for the past 50 or 60 years — just a tad bit more hand/eye/foot coordination and ability to concentrate than driving a car.

Or, as the old saying so aptly puts it, there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold or even middle-aged blind pilots with the attention span of a chicken. None. They don’t exist. At least not for long.

So, until recently, you couldn’t become a successful do-it-yourself air traveler unless you didn’t suffer from attention-span deficient and had a decent amount of money and enough available time to learn how to master flying and navigating an airplane.

Fortunately for people lacking in some or all of the above necessities, the fly-on-demand air-taxi revolution is rapidly clearing the way for even non pilots to do their own air-travel thing. You still need some money — though not, in many cases, that much more than you’d need to fly commercial — but other than that you’re rapidly (to steal a slogan) becoming “free to move about the country” without landing at a bunch of places where you don’t want to stop or taking off at an hour when you’d rather not leave.

Which is what makes that Southwest Airline slogan — you are now free to move about the country — far more applicable to VLJ air-taxi service than it is to Southwest’s regularly scheduled major city to major city service. Southwest does, to be sure, give you some freedom to move about the country. As America’s last standing air carrier using a “shortest distance between two points is a straight line” operating model, Southwest actually gives you a lot more freedom than its hub-and-spoke competitors. But that freedom is still compromised by time and place.

If you live in Passaic, New Jersey, for example, driving ten minutes to Teterboro Airport to rendezvous with the Eclipse 500 you ordered up for a 10 a.m. non-stop air-taxi flight to Rochester, New York is freedom to move about the country. Getting up at 5 a.m. to drag yourself all the way to JFK through brutal traffic for an 8 a.m. two-stop flight to the same destination is more aptly described as the freedom to endure torture.

Decades ago, the American Machinery and Foundry conglomerate, which at that time owned the Harley-Davidson Motor Company, advertised their motorcycles as Great American Freedom Machines. Perhaps, they were. Perhaps, in the 1950s and ’60s hopping on your AMF Harley and laying a trail of smoking rubber and leaked oil down to an AMF bowling alley (oops, bowling “center”) for a Schlitz or three and some thundering action on the lanes was as good a definition of “freedom” as anything else.

But times and definitions change. Heading toward the second decade of the 21st Century the Very Light Jet, with its potential to liberate untold numbers of travelers from the tyranny of the airlines, seems a very sure bet to become the Great Global Freedom Machine of the future.

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With oil prices nearing $110 a barrel as of early March, 2008, it’s reasonable to ask which segments of the passenger air transportation industry will be hardest hit by the inevitable avgas price hikes — scheduled airlines, charter companies, or VLJ air-taxi services. Though actual numbers are impossible to calculate because of the effect of gross weight, speed, wind and a dozen or so other factors on fuel flow, the simple answer is probably this: If every carrier filled every available seat on every possible flight, the net effect of skyrocketing fuel costs would probably be about the same for all of them.

Or, to put it another way, every carrier’s energy costs would rise by roughly the same percent, forcing each to either raise passenger fares (or in the case of charter operators, hourly rates), trim costs in other areas, or operate at significantly lower profit and return on investment rates.

Sadly, unless you happen to be one of the millions of airline passengers who enjoys being able to spread yourself, your iPod, your laptop and the rest of your carry-on rubble across three seats, no passenger carrier of any kind can operate at full capacity 100 percent of the time. In fact, very few carriers operate at full capacity any of the time … flights taking off with empty seats vastly outnumber those which leave 1, 10, or 100 excess passengers behind to battle about the value of their denied boarding compensation.

Realistically, scheduled airlines will be hardest hit by increased fuel costs. Unlike charter and air taxi operators, they can’t just leave their aircraft in the hanger when there’s no business. They have to (at least in theory, though bogus flight cancellations for “technical difficulties” are hardly unknown) burn black gold from Point A to Point B regardless of whether their 737-200 is hauling 120 passengers or 12.

And, thanks to deregulation and despite the industry’s many mergers, the still massive competition in the airline industry makes implementing major fare increases difficult, particularly for those carriers teetering on the brink of bankruptcy anyway.

As Northwest Airlines CEO Doug Steenland put it “if oil remains above $100 a barrel, it will cost Northwest $1.7 billion more than it planned for” in 2008 and “will again create a difficult financial challenge for the airline.”

Lest anyone misunderstand what Steenland means by “difficult financial challenge” again, we should remember that Northwest has only been out of its last bankruptcy for less than ten months.

Where Steenland is gloomy about energy price increases, his opposite number at Delta Airlines, which is frequently cited as a potential merger partner for Northwest, is a bit bellicose.

Keynoting an FAA conference in early March, Delta Chief Executive Richard Anderson lambasted the federal government for doing little or nothing to cap fuel prices.

“We don’t have an energy policy in this country,” Anderson said. “We really don’t have any conservation measures in place … jawboning OPEC is not an energy policy.”

While it’s hard to dispute Anderson’s premise that the U.S. lacks a coherent overall energy policy, it is easy (and correct) to argue that he obviously wasn’t thinking about VLJ air-taxi service when he said we don’t “have any conservation measures” in place, at least as far as air travel goes.

Simply put, a VLJ flying at partial capacity — say two out of four seats filled — uses far less fuel per passenger mile than an airliner with 60 of 120 seats filled.

One factor is design age. Back when today’s generation of jetliners and light jets such as the Lear and the Gulfstream were incubating, fuel economy, pollution, even — to some extent noise — were not major engineering considerations. The design gods were maximum payload, speed and range. Over the decades priorities have changed and those designs — particularly in regards to engines and control surfaces have been substantially improved. Current generation 737-500s, for example, are far more fuel efficient and “green” than the 737-100s which rolled out of Boeing’s Seattle fab shop in the late 1960s.

But upgrades can’t compete with ground-up designs in areas like materials and aerodynamics. Using lightweight composites unavailable to earlier generations of jet designers, Computational Fluid Dynamics modeling and open-jet wind tunnels, VLJ engineers have created fuel-efficient, environmentally friendly aircraft that virtually ensure that their operators will suffer less from escalating fuel prices than competitors using yesterday’s aircraft for short- and mid-range point-to-point transportation.

Better still, from the POV of all us end-users, the inherently more efficient nature of VLJs should bring the cost of a fly-on-demand air-taxi trip even closer to a first- or business-class airline ticket in the future than it is today.

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It’s generally agreed that the VLJ air-taxi revolution will change the way many business and professional travelers live. But will it also change where they live? According to Chuck McLaughlan of Innosight, a team of consultants who help companies develop, manage and cope with “disruptive” technologies, the answer is “yes.”

Full deployment of VLJ air-taxi service throughout the U.S. will not only be deeply disruptive to the traditional airline business, McLaughlan says, it will also “have implications for many other industries (such as) residential housing, because economical custom air travel may change where people choose to live relative to their workplaces.”

Just think about that for a moment. Could Very Light Jets eventually provide some of the same kind of release from geographic slavery that the internet has? The iNet, after all, has enabled untold numbers of people — so-called telecommuters — to live cities, states or even countries away from their employer’s headquarters. Could VLJ air-taxis free others from the tyranny of having to reside within commuting distance of a major airport?

In other words, is Chuck McLaughlin right?

We think he is.

Consider, for example, the aforementioned telecommuters. For every one of them lucky enough to be able to spend 365 days a year sitting with their laptop on the beach at Rio, there are hundreds who must spend several days in the company’s physical office every two or four weeks. Though all these people can, in theory, live wherever they want, reality requires they either live within convenient driving distance of the office or somewhere with relatively easy access to a commercial airport.

A robust, cost-effective air-taxi industry would change that reality. It would, as Chuck McLaughlin might say, disrupt it. It would give all those people vastly greater residential options.

Then there are those thousands and thousands of corporate sales and field force executives who leave their homes for the nearest international airport at 4:30 a.m. every Monday morning and don’t return until after midnight on Friday. Once again, the realities of their careers binds them to a home located a relatively straight-freeway shot from a major hub.

A fully developed VLJ air-taxi network would change that, too. For true road warriors, actually, the effect might be even greater. The elimination of endless rush-hour commutes to a major airport and 90-minute advance check-in requirements from their work week might even allow them to spend — courtesy of a convenient air taxi flight to a no-stress community airport — an occasional mid-week night at home.

How’s that for putting a positive spin on the word “disruptive?”

Plus there are other ramifications. Such as being able to add a quick $250,000 or $500,000 to your retirement fund by selling your 40-year-old, $1.7 million Santa Monica home down the road from LAX and relocating to a bigger, better, newer $750,000 home five minutes away from the Klamath Falls Municipal Airport.

And if VLJs are going to ease geographical constraints for individuals, they will surely have the same pleasantly disruptive effect on many corporations.

IBM’s relocation of many significant operating divisions from Southern California to Boulder, Colorado made business news headlines in the latter part of the 20th Century. The reasons for the moves were impeccable — lower real estate costs and corporate taxes, a more business-friendly political environment and a lower cost, better quality of life for employees.

What didn’t change much was the travel protocol for Big Blue’s middle-management executives. Where they had previously driven for an hour or so and flown out of L.A. or Burbank, they now drove for about 45 minutes and flew out of Denver. (Upper management’s situation didn’t change much either, instead of getting on a corporate jet in Van Nuys, they boarded at Boulder.)

The fact was that in trying to get out of the smog and second-rate public schools belt, IBM had to go to Boulder or someplace like it. They had far too many people in the air on a regular basis to locate more than 60 or 70 minutes from a commercial airport (no Fortune 500 company spends money to send a production manager to visit a factory on a Gulfstream or corporate 727.)

By about 2015, however, expanded VLJ air-taxi services will give companies planning to do an “IBM” out of L.A., Chicago or Manhattan a much richer selection of locations to choose from.

Or forget 2015. In some areas, companies have that choice right now. Take Florida. Thanks to DayJet, many firms thinking of relocating to the Sunshine State are no longer faced with the unappetizing choice between the equally gridlocked and expensive cities of Orlando, Miami and Tampa.

Disruptive?

Yes, the development of the VLJ air taxi industry can certainly be described as that. But it is a positive disruption. A productive disruption. A necessary disruption. A disruption reminiscent in some small way of another disruptive event that was all about freedom and choices — the American Revolution.

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What with a whole new generation of highly-efficient, super comfortable VLJs and some revolutionary business models and service modes, it’s hard not to notice that air-taxi service — whether provided by traditional Part 135 operators, new VLJ operators, or operators offering a combination of VLJ/piston/turboprop scheduled and fly-on-demand service — is an industry poised on the edge of massive, sustained growth.

How massive? How sustained? Is the air-taxi industry’s potential mile high, sky high or truly astronomically high.

Our vote goes to “astronomically.”

A key reason for our confidence in the industry’s future is the robust health of the older, more established and vastly more expensive alternative to scheduled airline travel: the aircraft charter business.

Believe it or not, America’s 2,500 air charter operators earned $8 billion in 2007. According to the financial reporting service Hoover’s Inc., that $8 billion — a full 40 percent of scheduled airlines’ aggregate earnings of $20 — was achieved by flying only 20 percent of the seat miles flown by the airlines.

To put a fine mathematical point on it, air charter operators derived twice as much revenue from each passenger carried as the airlines did.

Now consider just a few of the differences between jet charter and VLJ air-taxi services.

– The acquisition cost of aircraft used in charter service is typically 400 to 800 percent higher than that of the twin-engine VLJs in current and projected use by air taxi companies.

– VLJ per-mile operating costs are from 50 percent to 80 percent less than those of typical charter light and mid-weight jets.

– VLJ aircraft design and air-taxi business models have been 21st Century optimized to provide substantially higher equipment utilization rates and fewer/shorter maintenance and service downtime timelines than traditional charter aircraft.

– VLJs will eventually be able to service thousands of community airports not accessible by most charter aircraft.

How big is the potential VLJ air-taxi market? Will it eventually become the dominant commercial jet alternative to scheduled airline business travel and leave charter operators to handle freight and football teams traveling to bowl games?

Yes and no. VLJ air taxi operators will almost inevitably be someday carrying more passengers per year than traditional charter operators, but that won’t happen until at least two or three aircraft makers have been operating at full production for a couple of years. Realistically, it’s probably going to be four, five or even six years before enough VLJs are up and flying to offer a seat to everyone — or even almost everyone — who wants one. Even then, traditional business-passenger charters are hardly going to disappear. Corporations which can afford the bigger birds aren’t likely to trade 700mph trips between Factory A and Investment Analyst Meeting B for 375-400mph trips or, for cross-country or overseas trips, a 2500-mile or so cruising range for one a bit over a thousand miles. And, of course, distributing nine executives over three VLJs as opposed to stuffing them all into one Lear 45 pretty much wipes out the VLJ cost advantage while simultaneously creating logistical and communications havoc.

So, despite the VLJ revolution, charter companies are probably in no danger of losing the bulk of their current passengers. In good times and bad, despite energy crunches and hydrocarbon emissions angst, there will always be those who will, to reference the last thread in the AirTaxiFlights.com blog, prefer — and can afford — to take a limo rather than a cab.

The less positive note for charter operators is that they’re going to get relatively few of the masses of business travelers willing, able and more than ready to bail out of the no-longer-so-friendly scheduled-airline skies and migrate to the infinitely more user-friendly, convenient, time-saving and — in many cases — cost-effective world of personalized Very Light Jet air taxi service.

It is this vast new group of corporate middle-managers, independent business people, and professionals — travelers who never before had access to affordable personal air transport — who will fuel the VLJ air-taxi industry’s stratospheric growth and propel it past passenger air charter in miles flown, passengers carried, and return on investment.

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It’s no exaggeration to say that a great many observers expected the VLJ air-taxi revolution to begin earlier and spread more slowly. They expected to see someone — exactly who was still unclear in the early and mid-years of this decade — offer service in at least one, or best-case scenario, two regions of the U.S. by maybe the first quarter of 2007. By Q1 2008 they expected that service availability and quality would have improved substantially in those one or two regions without yet having expanded much beyond their borders.

Boy were all those observers — among them ourselves — wrong. Hindered by a myriad of the predictable and seemingly unavoidable teething problems that accompany every aviation advance, service launches were repeatedly pushed back. But once service was launched by North American Jet in Chicago and Dayjet in Florida it didn’t develop slowly, it exploded.

DayJet’s recent inauguration of Eclipse 500 service to Naples, Florida and Savannah, Georgia increases the number of cities it serves to 45, up from only five a mere four months ago. North American Jet, meanwhile, offers Eclipse service between Chicago and approximately 25 Midwest and East Coast cities including such major metro areas as New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Omaha and Cleveland and Linear Air is flying Eclipse 500s throughout the Northeast from its base at Hanscom Field outside Boston.

A few moments studying a coverage map shows that less than nine months into the VLJ era over 30 — and perhaps as much as 40 percent — of all Americans have access to VLJ air taxi/charter service. By year’s end it’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that number will have climbed to as much as 80 percent, a market penetration it took another rapidly emerging technology, broadband internet, a decade to reach.

So the question is not whether commercial VLJ operation is a growth industry. That much has been established. The real question is why the industry is growing at such a rapid rate despite the still very limited availability of aircraft.

As with most speculative questions, there are many possible answers. Here’s our favorite: Business people with mission-critical travel requirements have long been fed up with many scheduled carriers SOP (Stupidly Offensive Policies) and have developed a deeply felt longing for alternatives ranging from high-speed rail corridors to video-conferencing and net meetings. When VLJ service became available as the first really viable alternative, this pent-up demand created an instant user base that simply demanded immediate service extensions that far exceeded the operators’ expectations. Being good businesspeople, the operators accelerated their rollouts to meet that demand.

Make no mistake, when we’re talking about airline SOP being a turnoff we’re not referring to security. Regardless of whether you think airport security is too lax, too strict or simply too inefficient, decisions on those policies no longer rest with the airlines and haven’t for over five years.

What the airlines are responsible for is flights that don’t take off on time because crews aren’t scheduled properly, flights that are scheduled for airline rather than passenger convenience, flights that sit at the gate with the aircraft door locked because the airline won’t hire enough ground crew to service all their arrivals promptly, flights that sit on taxi ways forever waiting to take off or circle endlessly waiting to land because airlines insist on flight schedules identical to their competitors at hub after hub after hub.

Speaking of hub, after hub, after hub, it’s more than a bit ironic that 2008, the Year of the Very Light Jet, is also the 30th anniversary of the federal airline deregulation that allowed U.S. carriers to scrap their passenger-friendly point-to-point operating model for the much maligned hub-and-spoke system — from whence, decades before 9/11, much of today’s business traveler’s dissatisfaction with airlines sprang.

Since our topic is air taxis and VLJs, not United, American, et al, we won’t debate hub and spoke vs. point to point here. However, there are three facts that deserve to be mentioned. 1. The airline industry said they had to adopt hub and spoke in order to operate profitably. 2. Since adopting hub and spoke, bankruptcy has become an art, science and way of life in the airline industry. 3. Southwest Airlines, arguably America’s most successful airline of the past 15 years, is a classic point-to-point operator.

As are VLJ air-taxi services. They pick passengers up where they are and take them directly to where they need to be. That’s what point-to-point service is. And though it is more a rediscovery and improvement of an old mousetrap than the invention of a new one, hub-free Point A to Point B service is one of the prime drivers in the rapid acceptance of VLJ air-taxi service.

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ALBUQUERQUE, NM - January 08, 2008 - Eclipse Aviation, manufacturer of the world’s first very light jet (VLJ), announced it has produced and certified 104 Eclipse 500s since December 31, 2006. Reaching this milestone makes Eclipse the fastest general aviation jet aircraft manufacturer in history to produce its first 100 airplanes. The VLJ leader completed a total of 103 aircraft in 2007. Previously, the fastest ramp to 100 aircraft was achieved by Cessna, which reached 100 Cessna Citation 550 aircraft after approximately 18 months.

“We’re transforming how jets are built, and how people travel,” said Vern Raburn, Eclipse Aviation president and CEO. “It’s an audacious goal, and one that stretches us every day to go beyond what seems possible. Day-to-day setbacks are inevitable, but the reality is that we have created a new aircraft category and are bringing a new breed of jet to market at a rate never before seen in general aviation.”

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How many “experts” ever predicted how far, fast and high the Very Light Jet-driven Air Taxi Industry would fly in the very first quarter of its existence? How many frequently irritated and inconvenienced non-Floridian fliers in the Southeast, the Northeast, and the Midwest even dared ask Santa to put Fly-On-Demand VLJ access under their 2007 Christmas trees?

The obvious answer to both those questions is “very few.”

Yet, somehow, despite pre-certification delays at the FCC and production and avionics vendor issues at Eclipse, DayJet has spread its wings by 700 percent — serving 35 community airports in five states instead of five locations in one state — since its first commercial flights in October. Meanwhile, Linear Air and North American Jet are operating the first of their Eclipse 500s out of Boston and Chicago, respectively.

And with traditional Part 135 operators like Mercury Air Charter and TWC Aviation having already added VLJs to their California fleets, it’s a good bet that VLJ air-taxi service will be coming to the West Cost long before 2008 turns old and gray.

While the simple fact that it’s almost impossible to stop an idea whose time has really come is part of the reason for the unexpectedly fast adoption and high growth rate of VLJ air-taxi services, the real reason has more to do with the time, effort, study and sheer hard work that went into building this bold new industry’s foundation.

The VLJ service rollout truly is the “tip of the iceberg,” the “overnight success” that took what at times must have seemed to its creators like an eternity to happen.

DayJet, for example, “flew” virtual passengers on a full daily schedule for five long years before carrying their first real one. Yes, they really did. Every day employees at DayJet’s Virtual Operations Center sat in front of workstations and massaged simulated reservation, flight, ground crew and airframe availability, maintenance requirements and weather data into workable daily operating schedules.

Today they’re working through pretty much the exact same process with real planes and people. No wonder they’re more than a full year ahead of the “20 airports in four states by the end of 2008″ schedule DayJet Marketing Director Vicky Harris gave us in our exclusive interview.

Linear also spent years building a strong foundation for its VLJ business. Opting to refine their service in the real rather than the virtual world, it has been operating a fleet of Cessna Caravans using a VLJ-type air-taxi business model since 2003.

Noting that he founded Linear more because he loved the VLJ concept than because of any long-time interest in the air-taxi industry, company CEO Bill Herp explains the decision to begin service with Caravans this way: The VLJs weren’t out yet, but the Caravans operate at similar costs on similar kinds of trips, so it was a good way to try out the business model.”

We would be very remiss, in looking back at 2007, if we failed to note the years of preparation and pride Eclipse, Cessna — whose Mustang VLJ is already being used by charter operators and will probably be in air taxi service by Q2 — and their vendors contributed to making the VLJ Revolution take off more like a skyrocket than a traditional fixed-wing aircraft.

Had this blog been written exactly 12 months ago, it might have said that the vast majority of commercial travelers in the U.S. would have little chance of sampling VLJ air-taxi service before the end of 2009. Thanks in no small measure to the big thinkers and dedicated doers at all the companies noted above, we are delighted to report that we can no longer say that.

VLJ service is here and now. And if it hasn’t come to a community airport near you yet, it almost certainly will by the time the 2008 Flying Aces calendar is ready to down off the wall.

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HondaAero officially broke ground today on its newcorporate headquarters and state-of-the-art jet engine plant in Burlington,North Carolina, on property located adjacent to the Burlington-Alamance Countyregional airport. Honda Aero also announced that it has successfully run a proof-of-conceptversion of the advanced and efficient GE Honda HF120 turbofan engine, and thatthe engine has exceeded the company’s internal development targets for boththrust performance and specific fuel consumption (SFP) on its first test run.The company is moving toward its goals of engine certification in 2009followed by the start of mass production(1) in late 2010.

“Today, we break new ground for Honda and our effort to enter the businessof aviation,” said Satoshi Toshida, senior managing director of Honda MotorCo., Ltd. “The GE Honda Aero engines built here in North Carolina will powera new class of advanced light jets.”

The all-new, 102,400-square foot Honda Aero facility will consist of36,000 square feet of office space, a 58,400-square foot production plant, andan 8,000-square foot engine test cell. Honda Aero will employ approximately70 associates when the plant reaches its initial annual capacity of 200 GEHonda engines within about one year of production startup. The company isinvesting approximately $27 million for construction of the headquarters andmanufacturing facility, including equipment.

By achieving a higher thrust-to-weight ratio and lower fuel consumption,while minimizing emissions and achieving lower noise than other engines in itsthrust class, the GE Honda HF120 has been chosen to power two of the newestand most advanced products in the “very light jet” market — SpectrumAeronautical’s Freedom, and HondaJet, which will be produced in neighboringGreensboro, North Carolina, by the Honda Aircraft Company, Inc., a separateHonda company.

The HF120 is a higher thrust successor to Honda’s original HF118 prototypeengine, which has accumulated more than 4,000 hours of testing on the groundand in-flight. Honda research on jet engine technology started in 1986, withdevelopment of the HF118 engine beginning in 1999. GE-Honda collaboration onthe HF120 began in early 2005. The first core test of the GE Honda HF120 wasconducted in early 2007, followed by full-engine testing later in the year.

GE Honda Aero Engines is a joint venture between GE Aviation and HondaAero, established in 2004 for the development, certification andcommercialization of jet engines in the 1,000 to 3,500 pounds thrust class.

About Honda

Honda Aero, Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Honda Motor Co., Ltd.,the world’s preeminent engine maker, producing more than 26 million enginesannually for a diverse range of products including automobiles, motorcyclesand power equipment products. Founded in Japan in 1948, Honda beganoperations in the U.S. in 1959 with the establishment of American Honda MotorCo., Inc. (http://www.honda.com), Honda’s first overseas subsidiary. Hondabegan U.S. production of motorcycles in 1979 and automobiles in 1982. Hondabegan making power equipment products in Swepsonville, North Carolina in 1984,producing engines and lawnmowers. The company has invested more than$9 billion in its North American operations, with employment of more than35,000 associates, and annual purchases of more than $17.6 billion in partsand materials from suppliers in North America.

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Embraer and India’s Invision Projects Pvt. Ltd. have signed a contract for 18 Phenom 100 and two Phenom 300 executive jets. The new order was announced at the 2007 Dubai Air Show, November 11-15 and the total value of the deal, at list price, is US$ 69.4 million, and deliveries will begin in August 2010. This is the largest business jet fleet order in India to date. “We are honored to participate in the start-up of Invision’s branded charter and air taxi operations,” said Luís Carlos Affonso, Embraer Executive Vice President, Executive Jets. “Invision’s revolutionary business model initiative, combined with our innovative jets, will most certainly enjoy great acceptance in India, which we consider to be one of the most promising economies in the world.”

“Our priority was to find an aircraft that safely performs under Indian weather conditions, is luxurious enough to cater to High Networth Individuals (HNI) and top corporate executives, and is designed and built to airline standards for very high utilization,” said Mr. Vinit Phatak, Managing Director of Invision. “We were also looking for a well-established manufacturer that was flexible enough to incorporate in their design the extra safety equipment required by Indian’s Directorate General Civil Aviation (DGCA).”

Mr. Phatak added: “We found a match in the Phenom jets for all our essential parameters. For us, Embraer proved to be not only one of the world’s largest aircraft manufacturers, but also a company willing to take the special steps required to cater to the Indian subcontinent, an area considered to soon be one of the largest markets in the world.”

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