For those of you unfamiliar with my work, Eclipse is one of the companies I have been studying. They may have just won the race to the starting line (!) for the Very Light Jet market. Unsurprisingly, the announcement was made at an airshow:
Complete article here
FAA clearing the way for mini jets
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A new light, cheap and fast jet is expected to be certified for flight Thursday.
Eclipse Aviation's E500 will be the first "very light jet," or VLJ, to receive a provisional certification by the Federal Aviation Administration. Thousands more are expected to take wing over the next decade.
The announcement, at the annual AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, is one of the biggest things to happen to general aviation in years. Acting Transportation Secretary Maria Cino traveled to the show to make the announcement....
The big question surrounding VLJs is who will use them and where they will fly.
Vern Raburn, the founder of Albuquerque-based Eclipse Aviation Corp., predicts VLJs will be used as air taxis: for-hire limousines-with-wings that will take off and land at thousands of small airports. Businesspeople, he says, will be attracted to them because they will get where they need to go faster and with less hassle than on a commercial flight -- and cheaper than on a chartered business jet.
VLJs can land on runways as short as 3,000 feet (900 meters), compared with the 4,000 (1,200 meters) or 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) required by the smallest jets now being flown. The FAA says there are more than 5,000 small, underused airports in the United States.
No comments:
Post a Comment