Very Light Jets Garner Press Attention

If VLJs do not fulfill their promise, it certainly will not be for lack of press coverage with dozens of general assignment press reports in the past few months alone. Focus has been on the impending launch of two operations – DayJet and Linear Air – set to launch this month. The two will be introducing a new transportation paradigm into the market, as Wall Street Journal Reporter Scott McCartney explained it, they will make air-taxi services more affordable to consumers.
Christian Science Monitor Reporter Alexandra Marks said in a recent column that “these powerful, little fuel-efficient jets, they say, may prove to be nothing more than dotcoms with wings - a great innovation that brings jet flight to a relatively small number of private pilots.”
Marks wrote the Federal Aviation Administration “is gung-ho on the VLJs. The FAA hopes they will bring commercial air travel to thousands of smaller communities around the country. That's a major selling point for the consultants and investors banking on the air taxi model who believe the VLJ finally makes it possible. While regular small business jets start at around $4 million each, the VLJs on the market currently cost between $1 million and $3 million. They can seat up to six people and have high performance, fuel-efficient engines that make them twice as fast as turbo-props, which are often used in regional private travel.”

Aviation’s Microchip
While some may think of them as the dotcom of aviation, Matt Andersson, senior aviation consultant, Aerospace, Defense and Transportation, CRA International says VLJs will do for the transportation industry what the PC has done for mainframe computing and cellular is doing to telephony - give customers more service, more flexibility, more control at less cost as well as generate new products and services."
VLJs, more importantly, will bring many aviation assets into fuller productivity, especially smaller airports and underused airspace, said Andersson, adding the boost to economic productivity alone will have a profound impact as millions of travel hours are saved every year and "reinvested" back into the economy. The impact for small communities, which General Aviation Manufacturers Association Chair Jack Pelton called neglected markets, will be enormous.
Andersson noted the epithets associated with VLJs, calling descriptions such as "mosquito fleet" or "Pterodactyl Airlines," unhelpful sound bites. "As for the notion of a 'mosquito fleet,' I prefer a smart team of peregrine falcons, of fast swallows or a VLJ family of 'worker bees,' pollinating their environment and experts at making honey," he said.
New York Times Columnist Joe Sharkey, who has been chronicling this year’s excruciating commercial air travel experience noted in last week’s report that point-to-point services are already gaining popularity along with the airports which provide alternatives to heavily congested hubs.
“In recent years, some business travelers have been using smaller outlying airports — like Manchester International in New Hampshire, 50 miles from Boston, and Ontario International, 35 miles from downtown Los Angeles — with ‘point-to-point’ routes that avoid frantic connections,” wrote Sharkey. “Manchester’s passenger traffic, for instance, increased to more than 4.5 million last year from 1 million in 1997. Traffic growth at such airports comes mostly from point-to-point travel, often in short-haul, regional routes but also in longer ones by nimble carriers like Southwest Airlines. For the first eight months of 2007, Southwest…had an 8.3 percent increase in passenger miles flown. On the other hand, American Airlines, which builds its system around major hubs, reported a 2.1 percent decline.”
Sharkey also reported that some passengers such as Doug Laubach, who owns a Syracuse engineering firm, has resorting to driving, as many as 900 miles owing to the uncertainty of commercial flying. The same passenger pegged his usual maximum driving distance at “how long you can spend getting to and from an airport and flying somewhere.” Laubach also makes a company car available to employees for business trips, who are encouraged to combine business and pleasure by bringing their families along, according to Sharkey.
“’There is no reliability left in the air traffic system,’ Sharkey wrote, quoting Laubach and adding the engineer often drives to avoid delays at the Syracuse airport and to get to a major hub like Chicago, where he then flies to jobs in places like Colorado.
Sharkey cited National Business Aircraft Association statistics, adding passenger discontent has become a boon to business aviation having grown from 7,000 aircraft in the U.S. in 2000 to 11,000 today. He also said FAA expects 350 VLJs will be added to the fleet in 2008, with an additional 400-500 annually over the next decade. However, forecasts vary widely on that, according to the General Accountability Office which also said previous forecasts of this new segment of the business aviation market have been way off. (See related story this issue – GAO Reins in VLJ Forecasts)
All this is music to the likes of DayJet and Linear. DayJet has indicated it has signed up 1,000 corporate accounts for its new intra-Florida service, which uses the three-passenger Eclipse 500.
Also set to start Eclipse service this month is Linear Air in New England. (See profile of Linear Air in this issue)