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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Riddle this, if you can.

What do you call an air-taxi service that operates more than 20 jets, flies over 16,000 hours a year, uses its aircraft to pick up and deliver people to and from an average of five or six regional airports a day, and doesn’t carry paying passengers?

Answer: Wal-Mart.

With about 17 Learjets (45s, 40s, 31s and 31As) and one long-range Bombardier Global Express (a Canadair Challenger was recently decommissioned) stationed at Rogers Municipal Airport (KROQ) near corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas and several other jets based at locations in Canada and Mexico, Wal-Mart is not only the world’s biggest retailer, it is one of the world’s largest and most prolific users of corporate aircraft.

What makes Wal-Mart Aviation, the wholly owned subsidiary that operates the Wal-Mart fleet, particularly interesting here is that its operating model is much more like that of an air-taxi operator than a typical Fortune 100 mega-corporation.

Traditional corporate jets, for example, are for the most part the flying preserves of top executives, board directors and occasional VICs (Very Important Customers.) Though Wal-Mart’s senior managers do, of course, fly on the company aircraft, they can be (and often are) bumped to make way for technicians or key line managers. In fact, the great bulk of Wal-Mart Aviation’s passengers are corporate middle-managers, store managers, buyers, inspectors and other employees — almost 25,000 of them a year — making under $100,000 annually.

The reason for this unusual corporate passenger mix is as simple and clear as the rationale for virtually all new-generation air taxi operations: Most of the business is done in places where the major airlines don’t fly.

Specifically, Wal-Mart operates approximately 3800 stores, the vast majority of which are not within a 20 minute cab ride of a major airport. Take, for example, the Wal-Mart store in Ponderay, Idaho, a major trading post for both Idaho Panhandle residents and thousands of Canadians who cross the border at nearby Eastport to shop at the Wal-Mart because it’s 30 or 40 miles closer to them than any similarly sized store in Canada.

Getting to and from Spokane International to the Ponderay Wal-Mart takes approximately 100 minutes in each direction not including time spent at the airport checking in, going through security and all the rest of the drill. Ground transportation from the Sandpoint Municipal Airport (which is, coincidentally, home to the considerably smaller Coldwater Creek clothing company corporate jet fleet) to the Ponderay Wal-Mart takes approximately seven minutes and eliminates virtually all the airport downtime beyond waiting for takeoff and landing clearance.

To understand why Wal-Mart finds it cost efficient to maintain such an extensive in-house “air taxi” system you only have to do the math. Putting the same mid- and junior-level road warriors on commercial flights would probably cut their maximum number of daily store or vendor visits to two, using the corporate jets they can average three to five.

Though Wal-Mart could, in theory, save millions of dollars in annual operating expenses by downsizing a substantial portion of its fleet to VLJs, it has no plans to do so, choosing, instead, to maximize the efficiency of its Lears by maintaining a load factor of plus-five passengers per flight leg.

“Our load factor is 5.2, so we really get incredible efficiency out of these airplanes,” Wal-Mart director of Global Travel Services Duane Futch said in an interview with Business Travel News. “We’re not just going out and dropping one person off. They always travel with a team that is going to do the job they have to do in the field. We don’t just drop that team off. That airplane is constantly moving. The typical Wal-Mart airplane will make between three and six stops a day: picking up people, dropping people off … moving them to another location.”

As is the case with many commercial air-taxi operations, Wal-Mart’s fleet management needs are sufficiently complex to demand more than an off-the-shelf management solution to handle passenger, crew, maintenance, inspection and other scheduling and back-office tasks. Building on Atlanta-based Seagil Software’s BART aviation management system, WalMart programmers fashioned a series of custom application extensions maximizing efficiency while retaining the flexibility to quickly change everything from routings to passenger lists in response to unforeseen circumstances requiring immediate attention (a computer system meltdown at a remote division, for example.)

Like many new-generation air-taxi operators, Wal-Mart Aviation also recognizes the importance of full-service, high-level ground services (think DayJets’ DayPorts). Not only does the company own and operate a private ATC tower at Rogers field, a wholly owned FBO at the airport, 22-year-old Beaver Lake Aviation, supplies everything from free popcorn to computerized weather tracking, executive conference rooms, crew quiet and snooze rooms, exercise facilities, washing machines and courtesy transportation to nearby restaurants.

And if all this isn’t enough to convince skeptics that Wal-Mart Aviation is really just an air-taxi company in corporate clothing, consider this: The company traces its history back to 1954 when Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton bought a single-engine Ercoupe 415 and began flying it to stores in Arkansas and adjacent states because it was faster than driving between locations on twisting Ozark Mountain roads.

Getting business travelers off the highways and up in the skyways. Today, half century after Sam Walton began practicing it, it’s become one of the primary mantras of the entire air-taxi industry.

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It’s development budget was enormous, a sum measured in hundreds of billions, not millions. It was the brainchild of some of the most brilliant aircraft designers ever assembled to work on a single project. It was backed by the unlimited technological and manufacturing resources of many of the world’s largest and prestigious aviation contractors and sub-contractors.

Even with all that, it took over a decade to get it from concept to first flight. Even with all that, it never lived up to its original mission and only became successful after a new role was invented for it. Even with all that, it began “revenue service” years behind schedule and at a per-aircraft acquisition cost 400 percent higher than originally projected.

Oh, yeah, it also took three revisions over eight years (1989-1997) before production models with full capabilities were operational.

You’ve probably guessed what “it” is by now but, in case you haven’t, what we’re talking about here is the B2 Spirit (aka Stealth) Bomber, compared to which the development timeline glitches suffered by the Eclipse 500 are as insignificant as a single grain — or perhaps even half a grain — of sand in the Sahara.

It could be argued that a radar-unfriendly, 336.500-pound nuclear bomber has little in common with the world’s most compact (to date) twin-jet passenger aircraft, but it would be a faulty argument. What the two flying machines have in common is that they are both almost revolutionary restatements of conventional aircraft wisdom and, as such, amply demonstrate the teething pains that have accompanied every major sea change in manned-flight technology.

In some ways, it’s even fair to say that the Eclipse engineers had a tougher row to hoe than the scientists behind the Stealth. The Eclipse 500, for one thing, had to be designed to sell in a competitive market for about $1.5 million per aircraft. The captive market known in demographic terms as “U.S. Taxpayers” has coughed up somewhere north of $2 billion for each B2 delivered to the Air Force.

Then too, the Eclipse has had to meet FAA passenger-carrying requirements and the B2 hasn’t. It may seem silly to say that it’s harder to certify an air-taxi shuttle craft than a super bomber and in some ways it is. But bombers are not expected to safely transport tens of thousands of civilians over millions of air miles for two or three decades. The infamous U2 spy plane, as just one example, is notoriously unstable and difficult to fly and almost certainly would never have been granted FAA Part 135 certification even if someone had figured out a way to stuff a passenger seat somewhere in the fuselage.

With full “operating in known icing conditions” and European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) certification perhaps no more than six weeks away (as of May, 2008), it might be interesting to take a look at some of the major twists and turns on the Eclipse 500 sky map and see if any of them has had a seriously negative effect on the aircraft’s present and future utility.

1. Replacement of Williams International with Pratt & Whitney as engine vendor in late 2002. True, Sam Williams and his company pioneered development of mini-turbofans, but P&W has much more experience building prime movers for high-utilization civilian aircraft. Reasons for the change were hotly debated (Williams blamed it on an overweight airframe, Eclipse on an under-thrusting engine), but the net result was part of the reason the 500 missed its official type certification target date of late 2004 by almost two years.

2. Switching production of Eclipse’s proprietary Avio NG Total Aircraft Integration System from Avidyne to Innovative Solutions & Support in Q1 of 2007. Taking place in the period between FAA type certification and production certification, it is generally believed that this change in vendors did not appreciably delay the 500 program. In announcing the change, however, Eclipse did admit that product delays and other difficulties at Avidyne had previously set their certification schedule back by about six months.

3. Lack of certification to fly into known icing conditions. This issue has definitely been a thorn in the side of early Eclipse 500 adopters in the Northeast and Midwest. Equipped with all the “right stuff” — flexible rubber boots for its control surfaces, an engine nacelle air bleed system and a heated windshield — the main reason for the delay in this certification appears to more a matter of Mother Nature than anything else. The 500 was certified for production in late April 2007, after the winter storm season, and “icing” certification requires testing under both simulated and actual conditions. Tests with man-made “shaped ice” and flight tests in known icing conditions were conducted throughout the past winter and certification was expected sometime in June.

4. Delays in 100 percent implementation and integration of the full avionics suite. This has been the most persistent “delay” issue in the 500’s development cycle and, inarguably, the most understandable given that the goal has been to provide as good — or better — an avionics environment in a $1.5 microjet as that available in a $200 million jumbo jet.

In practical terms, however, the as-yet-pending implementation of such features as GPS capability, full flight management system (FMS), electronic distance measuring (DME), automatic direction finder (ADF), and mode-F transponders didn’t seem to delay the 500’s production certification. Nor are there any reports that it’s negatively impacting current operators in any significant way.

According to Eclipse, installation of dual Garmin GPS 400W WAAS-certified moving-map GPS navigators later this year in production models and early next year as a no-cost upgrade to the existing user fleet should provide the missing FMS pieces, including coupled localized autopilot operation with vertical guidance approach. Pending software updates should shortly close most of the other avionics gaps.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s this: Good things happen when you do the job right and don’t hesitate to make necessary changes — such as switching engine or avionics vendors — out of concern for possible negative PR fallout or fulminating feedback from industry or financial gadflies.

To this point in its young life, the Eclipse 500 is an unqualified success. The aircraft is meeting or exceeding all its promised speed, altitude, cruising range and fuel efficiency specifications, it is hugely popular with its passengers, owners, and pilots, it’s broken all production records for first-year general aviation jet aircraft and it’s filled Eclipse Aviation’s order book through Q1 2010.

Not bad for an airplane which weighs substantially less than 330,000 pounds and isn’t even invisible to radar.

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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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