Joining the Jet Set on the Cheap
A Florida native, George Tedder loves his home state. But he has seen enough of it from the ground, driving 50,000 miles a year between the Florida offices of the engineering firm where he works. So Tedder gushes when he talks about DayJet, a start-up that promises to fly him between his home in Gainesville to his offices in West Palm Beach, Lakeland, or Tallahassee-direct. And not on some thumping turboprop. No, DayJet will fly a shrunken jet, one that carries only three or four passengers. "It's like when I was a kid reading Popular Science about cars that will fly," says Tedder, 50, who recently tried one of the jets on for size when DayJet flew it into Gainesville. "It is just so cool."
There is a certain zeal that permeates the nascent world of "very light jets," a new class of airplane under development at a half-dozen or more manufacturers. They're gambling more than $1 billion that the aircraft, untested in the market, can expand sales of small jets to private owners and to fleets at new air taxis like DayJet in the Southeast and Linear Air in the Northeast, for starters. "The revolution won't stop here," says William Herp, Linear Air's CEO.
The idea of smaller, technically advanced jets has percolated since at least the 1980s, when developments in navigation and electronics suggested something dramatic could emerge, says Bruce Holmes of NASA, which helped nurse the concept. "The big idea was that these airplanes could change aviation," he says.
Prices for the aircraft start at about $1.5 million for an Eclipse Aviation model, which recently won federal certification to go into production. That's less than half the $4 million it now takes to buy a business jet. Cessna has a certified model it's selling for $2.6 million, and while it meets the informal description of a very light jet (under 10,000 pounds), Cessna says it isn't marketing it as such. Other VLJs are known to be coming from Adam Aircraft, Honda, Diamond Aircraft, and Embraer Air. Their boosters talk of thousands of the minijets flying in a matter of years; more than 3,000 are already on order, and planned sales would hit a thousand a year. That's in a market for business jets that this year, a good year by historic standards, will sell a total of about 900 planes.
Crowded skies. Sounds like a stretch to Gerald Bernstein, an aviation consultant at the Velocity Group. For one, air taxis would work only in regions with clusters of cities that also have poor commercial air service. Overall, he's predicting sales would top out at around 700 aircraft a year at most, meaning a shakeout is inevitable. "There are just too many players out there," he says. Teal Group researcher Richard Aboulafia is harsher, predicting sales of perhaps 300 a year. The planes include impressive advances in electronics and engines, he says, "but there's no magic here. It sounds more like buzz designed to get investment cash." That is, it sounds more like the days of the Internet bubble.
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