Very Light Jets have been on the leading edge of the current financial crisis with most newly minted manufacturers and commercial operations being the first to experience the constipation in the credit markets. Financiers began abandoning the market in droves as early as August 2007 at a time when some where predicting very light jets would be the “microchip of aviation.” Fiscal brinksmanship became the order of the day for the likes of Adam Aircraft, Eclipse and DayJet, and, as the crisis deepened, Adam and DayJet failed completely.
So, it should come as no surprise that the high hopes we had for the one-time darlings of aviation industry came crashing down last year. Pundits, and we agree, said it would take a decade before the market matured with the usual bumps along the way. Unfortunately, unlike their regional airline counterparts, VLJs did not have deregulation to give them a boost. What VLJs survive – certainly the Mustang and Phenoms – will have a great future but it is a future for which we are unable to wait given the economic climate that has seen publishing revenues decline dramatically as well. Our publisher – Access Intelligence – is doing well, unlike many of its peers – but has decided to move on.
Consequently, this is the last issue of a bold experiment – Aviation Today’s Very Light Jet Report. As with many who ventured into this market, we, too, are singing our swan song. Instead we embark on a dramatic new frontier for Access Intelligence’s Aviation Group – a daily aviation publication – Aviation Today’s Daily Brief. In addition to reporting the news, ATDB has the formidable task of providing an analysis of its impact on the bottom line. It will bring you UNIQUE content. In short, it hopes to set a new standard in aviation reporting.
Aviation Today readers have noticed an increasing focus on e-letters rather than newsletters and on economic news. The response has prompted us to rethink our weekly newsletter format in the face of the information superhighway and the events of last year. We’ve concluded that there is still a void in the current crop of aviation information sources. We have also found a need to winnow the plethora of information on the Internet into a daily brief. If you find it covered by ATDB, it means there is a significant impact on the bottom line. And that’s the idea behind ATDB – provide a daily briefing on the news but focusing on in-depth analytical stories that speak to the bottom line.
Subscriptions will be transferred to Aviation Today’s Daily News Brief. While I may not be exclusively focused on the Very Light Jet industry, I will be watching it carefully, especially those commercial operations such as Linear Air and SATAir who are now providing air service to the hundreds of communities that have lost it in the last decade as the mainline and regional airline industries have evolved. I remain fascinated by that kind of service because it was what I cut my teeth on as a young reporter more than 28 years ago.
So, I’ll just say welcome to a new era in aviation reporting; one that will leverage the technology of the internet to provide a different kind of news source.
Kathryn Creedy, Editor