Joining the Jet Set on the Cheap
Hype or not, the start-ups in this business swarm with former tech execs. Eclipse Aviation founder Vern Raburn,an early believer in the concept, is a former Microsoft executive and has Bill Gates as a key investor. "It's always the outside [expletive] who comes in and says he can do it better," Raburn says. He's also using plenty of tech, including cutting-edge electronics in the cockpit and computers to automate his production line. That's where the test moves now, after the Eclipse 500 recently won certification. "Now we've got to go build these suckers, at the speed and cost that we said we could," Raburn says.
The Eclipse 500 will hold two pilots and three or four passengers-and no bathroom, which Raburn argues isn't needed on the short flights that are targeted by the jets. A competitor, Adam Aircraft, is nearing certification of its A700, a twin-boom model whose look is akin to an upside-down catamaran. The wider tail should make for a smoother ride and allows room for five passengers, and a bathroom, says Adam President Joe Walker. "A bathroom is about perception-it may never be used, but many people will want it there," he says. The futuristic tail also gives the A700 some pizazz, Walker says: "It's sort of like pulling up in front of a restaurant in a Ferrari."
CEO and founder Rick Adam once ran information technology for Goldman Sachs before making a fortune at his own tech company in the late 1990s. He invested $26 million to launch the aircraft business, which already has a turboprop version in the air. One of its biggest customers is Magnum Jet, which will operate what it calls an "air limousine" service in the Northeast, at least initially booking only an entire plane to companies or groups.
More of a pure air taxi, DayJet plans to sell single seats on demand. That requires a sophisticated computer system to match customers with planes and times. Founder Ed Iacobucci worked at IBM and then helped start Citrix Systems, and seems not to have left the tech business, as he throws around terms like "scalability" and "peer to peer" in designing DayJet's network-of routes, not computers. Only when pushed does Iacobucci talk about the Eclipse aircraft that he's buying; even then, he says the biggest advantage is that they're coming from the first mass producer of business jets. "It's having a critical mass of airplanes that are exactly the same," he says.
The air taxis are the unknown in whether the very light jets can achieve widespread success. Generally, the services plan to charge between $1 and $3 a mile, much less than the $10 that a typical private jet might charge but usually more than a first-class or last-minute commercial air ticket. Many of their potential customers now drive between cities, and it's those folks who will have to put a high value on their time to make the investment in jets pay off, says Raburn at Eclipse. "This is about personalizing air travel for a group of people," he says. "This is not about a chicken in every pot-this is not the VolksJet yet."
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