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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Recently launched DayJet founder Ed Iacobucci was recently interviewed by Jon Udell. Widely known in IT circles as the co-founder of Citrix, Iacobucci left in 2000 to pursue his interest in aviation. In 2002 he co-founded DayJet, a company whose mission is to deliver on-demand, per-seat jet travel service. In this interview, Ed describes how he worked through a false start, realized that on-demand air travel would require a platform, decided that Eclipse Aviation’s line of precision-engineered, mass-producable, and affordable jets would be the platform’s equivalent to the personal computer, and then led the teams that conceived and created its network operating system and software service infrastructure. Click here to hear the interview.

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It’s really happened - At long last we can stop talking and thinking about the “pending revolution” in air travel - The revolution has come - The future is now. DayJet has officially launched. And Very Light Jet, fly-on-demand air-taxi service is now an everyday reality for Florida fliers in the Boca Raton, Gainesville, Lakeland, Pensacola and Tallahassee markets.

Of equal importance to business travelers outside those regions, DayJet CEO Ed Iacobucci used the October 4 “grand opening” of service to the five initial Florida Dayports to reiterate his and DayJet’s commitment to expand service to at least Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and the rest of Florida within two years. “Starting today, business travelers in the Southeast can have all the power in the travel relationship,” Iacobucci told interviewers. “They can decide how much their time is worth and dictate a travel itinerary that increases their productivity and enhances their quality of life.”
The process of putting “all the power” in travelers’ hands has taken a mere eye blink — a little over a decade — in terms of the time usually required to develop, prove and launch an entirely new category of aircraft and a matching air-transport operating model.

So as we celebrate DayJet’s placing its milestone in the skyline of aviation progress, it might be interesting to take a brief look at how we got from Point A — Dr. Sam Williams development of the 85-pound FJX-2 turbofan engine — to points Boca Raton, Gainesville, Lakeland, Pensacola and beyond.

In 1996 Williams, whose company Williams International had made its bones developing mini-jet engines for the Defense Department’s Tomahawk missile and the light-jet prime movers used in Cessna’s CitationJet, built the prototype FJX-2 under a NASA contract that allowed him to also market the engine and its derivatives for civilian use. About two years into his evangelizing the gospel of compact fuel-efficient, low-noise, high-thrust-to-weight-ratio jet engines , Williams made his first, most important, convert, Vern Rayburn, a high-tech troubleshooter obsessed with finding a better, more efficient way for executives like himself to get to and from all the off-the-major-airline-grid communities on their travel schedules.

Envisioning a fleet of Williams-powered microjets (as VLJs were then called) as the realization of his dream, Rayburn incorporated Eclipse Aviation in 1998 and announced plans to built a twin-engined, three or four passenger, dual-pilot jet that would boast a price sticker 50 percent below that of an entry-level business jet, make its way through the skies for about a dollar a mile, and contain state-of-the-art navigation and communications systems equal to those on airline jumbo jets. (Note: The fact that the Eclipse 500 was eventually powered by Pratt & Whitney rather than Williams engines in no way detracts from Sam Williams heroic status and importance in this history.)

Enter Ed Iacobucci, another high-tech-industry frequent flier who’d grown weary of the major airline and metropolitan airport shuffle. In 2000, Ed and his wife Nancy took their first shot at solving that problem by founding Wingfoot Services LLC, a traditional on-demand charter company. By 2001, they realized that charter service using conventional aircraft was an answer, but not a particularly good or highly profitable one.

Deciding that Vern Rayburn’s low-cost, high-efficiency Eclipse 500 was a better solution, they incorporated DayJet in 2002, got on the Eclipse 500 waiting list in position number one, and began five years of developing, refining and virtual-world testing DayJet’s proprietary Astro (Advanced System Technology for Real-Time Operations) operations system, a paperless software suite that automatically deploys aircraft and crews based on reservation system, aircraft instrumentation, personnel, weather and maintenance data.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Except that it isn’t really history, which implies something that’s past. The real rest of the story is about the present as DayJet flies passengers across Florida unshackled by fixed schedules, inflexible itineraries, and mile-long runways.
The real rest of the story is even more about a future in which DayJet and other fly-on-demand operators grab onto the torch lit by Sam Williams, Vern Rayburn and Ed Iacobucci and carry it out of the Southeast to the rest of America and the world.

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Eclipse Aviation has received its production certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The company had already received “type certification” for its Eclipse 500 jet last September, but until receiving the production certification, the FAA had to examine each individual aircraft before it could be delivered to customers. That greatly impeded the delivery of its jets since last year, with only seven planes handed over to customers since December.

With the production certificate in hand, Eclipse itself can now issue standard airworthiness certificates for planes as they roll off the production line, allowing the company to ramp up deliveries, says Eclipse spokesman Andrew Broom.

Click here to read the rest of this article. 

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Cessna announced this week they delivered the first retail Citation Mustang business jet to Dave and Dawn Goode of GOODE Ski Technologies.This is the third production Mustang delivered with the first two being used by Cessna as demonstration aircraft.

“We are proud to be the owners of the first retail Mustang and excited about putting it into service,” said David Goode, president and founder of GOODE Ski Technologies. “We have a great deal of confidence in this aircraft because it represents the best of what Cessna has to offer, including an extensive support network to stand behind it.”

The Cessna Citation is manufacturered by Textron, Cessna’s parent company.  The Citation is Cessna’s entry into the Air Taxi Very - Light Jet marketplace.  

You can read the entire press release here.

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Eclipse Aviation has taken their Eclipse 500 very light jet on a European tour.

The aircraft flew out of Albuquerque on April 14 en route to the AERO 2007 show in Friedrichshafen, Germany.  It traveled the North Atlantic route via Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom before landing in Germany. It’s the first time the company has taken the twin-engine jet outside of North America.

In addition to AERO 2007, the plane will be displayed at the EUR-AVIA show in Cannes, France, on April 27, and at the European Business Aviation Conference and Exposition in Geneva, Switzerland, on May 22.

With a range of 1,125 nautical miles, the Eclipse 500 can easily make trans-European flights, whether from London to Warsaw, Oslo to Milan, or Madrid to Moscow, said Spokesman Andrew Broom in a news release.

“Europe is such a great market for the Eclipse 500,” Broom said. “We already have more than 100 orders throughout this market, and we believe that once people in Europe and the UK see it and fly it, we can change the way they travel.

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Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer said today they expect to deliver 300 Phenom jets in 2009 and 2010.

Embraer should deliver between 120 and 150 jets from its Phenom line in 2009 and another similar batch in 2010, Luis Carlos Affonso said.  The Phenom line includes two types of small, luxurious business jets that Embraer is developing.

The Phenom 100 is a Very Light Jet which can accommodate only 4 passengers with a flying range of 1,320 nautical miles. The Phenom 300 is a light jet that seats 8 or 9 occupants and has a flying range of 1,800 nautical miles.The two Phenoms will be ready to go into operation in 2008 and 2009 respectively.

Embraer, short for Empresa Brasileira de Aeronautica, is the world’s fourth-largest commercial jet maker.

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Eclipse Aviation is gearing up to deliver more customer jets, it’s encourtering new snags.

Heaters inside the pitot and angle of attack probe systems on the Eclipse 500 jet don’t heat a wide enough area, allowing moisture in lines to the pitot and angle of attack systems to freeze and block airspeed measurements according to a Eclipse Aviation press release this week.

The defect, expected to be corrected by designing additional heaters for the probes and adding insulation, will
temporarily limit the aircraft to VFR operations and require either a factory pilot or a factory-trained mentor to be on board.

There are now 10 factory pilots who are type rated in the aircraft.  In-flight loss of airspeed indications have occurred on three flights. Airspeed indications were still available on a backup system, and indications dependent on the probes returned after descending to warmer altitudes. The aircraft may still operate on IFR flight plans, but only in visual meteorological conditions.

The good news is that there is already a factory requirement for newly type-rated pilots to fly with a mentor for 25 hours or possibly more hours based on demonstrated skill level. Eclipse plans to announce a new flight training provider now that United Services, a division of United Airlines, has decided to end its services this summer. So far, Eclipse has delivered
five customer airplanes.

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