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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Here’s a classic example of how the air taxi model is changing the very nature of business travel.

A wholesaler in Florida, used to a grueling full-day auto trip between his rural warehouse and a vendor’s factory located off the beaten track of the Sunshine State’s international airports, discovers that an air taxi service has started serving his community field on a price-per-seat basis.

He bids on a seat, takes a 23 minute flight, examines a line of new gadgets being produced at his vendor’s factory, writes a check for an order, re-boards the air taxi and is back at his home airfield 25 minutes later. Total time away from his warehouse, including both legs of the flight, ground transportation at both ends and an hour spent at the factory was well under three hours — a savings of more than five hours over prior trips.

Unusual? Not really. At least not in Florida where, at last count, three or four or maybe — counting any new operators who may have launched since yesterday — six or seven air taxi carriers are competing for the major airlines’ passengers and dollars.

Still, that level of virtual portal to portal air-taxi service is not yet available nationwide and even in areas where it is available service is sometimes limited by passenger demand being quite a bit higher than the supply of aircraft, particularly when it comes to VLJ service. So you could, perhaps, call the trip “uncommon.”

But certainly not “mindboggling.” No way was that classic air-taxi trip mindboggling.

Except that it was.

The New Year’s Day flight of Abram Pheil from St. Petersburg to Tampa, his purchasing some products for his wholesale business and his flying back only a few hours later was more than merely mindboggling. It was, to many, simply unbelievable.

Which is hardly surprising since the year was 1914 and Mr. Pheil had just taken world history’s first recorded air taxi flight. He had, in fact, just become the first paying passenger in American aviation history to fly roundtrip between one city and another.

History does not record the altitude and speed at which St. Louis automotive engineer and aircraft builder Tom Benoist’s Type XIIII flying boat, piloted by the legendary Tony Jannus, transported Abram Pheil on his historic flight over Tampa Bay, but it’s reasonable to assume it was at least 300 knots per hour slower and 39,000 feet lower than an Eclipse 500 in full cruise mode.

Some things, on the other hand, never change and the law of supply and demand is one of them. Abram Pheil paid a 800 percent premium over the scheduled $5 fare (plus a $5 excess baggage fee for more than one carryon) to win his $400 ticket at a public auction. And when regular twice daily flights began January 2, passenger space on the nascent St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line’s sole Benoit was sold out 16 weeks in advance.

Interestingly, a second Benoit was later added to provide fly-on-demand service from St. Petersburg to cities like Clearwater, Manatee, Bradenton, Tarpon Springs, Palmetto and Egmont Key, thus mirroring the operating model of the many current air-taxi operators who maintain fixed schedules between some cities and offer fly-on-demand service to anywhere with a useable airport.

It’s hard to imagine, in these days when some air taxi aircraft have instrumentation rivaling that of $60,000,000 commercial jets, others have parachutes designed to safely transport the aircraft and its passengers to terra firm if the engine quits and all benefit from the communications, routing and guidance of the world’s safest air traffic control network, how much courage Abram Pheil and the passengers queuing up behind him must have had.

For one thing, it had only been ten years since Kitty Hawk. The vast majority of the world’s inhabitants — even in America — had never seen an airplane, on the ground or in the air, except in pictures. For another thing, those who were familiar with passenger air travel undoubtedly thought of it in terms of Zeppelins, which by 1914 had safely carried over 35,000 passengers throughout Germany, a record that had been highly publicized in the U.S. and the rest of world.

Despite the fact that they were, as the Commander of the Lakehurst Naval Air Station observed the day before the Hindenburg tragedy, “flying crematoriums,” the Zeps looked robust, safe, even formidable next to the frail-seeming heavier-than-air craft of the time.

Even though Benoist assured customers that “my plane is figured down to the last equation, and improved up to the second …every nut, bolt, wire, wood member, and piece of cloth is examined, tried and tested before it goes into our machines” and boasted that “some others may be built as good, but none are built better, because we use the best of everything” getting onboard one must have been a daunting experience.

So what could have made a respectable, seemingly sane merchant like Abram Pheil climb into the cockpit of a Benoist, with a huge wooden pusher propeller driven by a clanking roller chain churning the air behind him, to fly — of all the ungodly things — to a business meeting?

Unfortunately, we’ll never know for sure unless someone, someday turns up a long hidden diary or letter on the subject written by Pheil himself. But it would be nice to think that he and the other mid-Florida business people who opted out of their Model Ts and Locomobiles, Oldsmobiles and Auburns, Packards and Duryeas to take to the air were motivated by exactly the same thing that is motivating so many of us to leave the unfriendly airline skies and gridlocked freeways.

They were mad as hell about their current transportation options and simply decided not to take it anymore.

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