I’m not alone.
Posted by adam on September 13, 2006 under Story Telling
It is good not be alone. At first there was just fellow nerds (ok, gurus!) and academics like the Teal Group. Then there was the blog Richard Aboulafia showed me, and it dawned on me: I’m not alone. One of the most powerful feelings for lackeys like me, is to know that there are other lackeys thinking the same way. Which is really quite simple:
Are we the only ones warily eyeing the VLJ hooplah? The press, the start ups, even a few questionable pilots bang down the door with “what do you think, pretty cool, eh?” Well yes, ofcourse new technology is cool. But what is really happening here?
The answer no one wants to hear is simple: Nothing.
Strapping big cruise missile engines to small airframes is a cool idea for having something in the garage to brag about. Heck, men especially seek things to brag about when feeling inadequate in other departments. (No further discussion of that topic here.) But, ask yourself how and why so many diamonds and overpriced sports cars are sold - is it because they were really needed, provided value, revolutionized the lives of their owners?
I hate to be the party pooper again, but Stan Blankenship goes through Eclipse like a hot knife through butter. Who can argue with facts. Even the softer crowd at AvWeb has begun to see the many footnotes that surround press releases. And there is always Richard, always on the prowl for business models that work - since they are such nuggets when you find them in aviation and aerospace.
My fantasy? I want Herb Kelleher and Burt Rutan at my table. Why not surround yourself with innovators from the get go? A tiny bit of research shows that Rutan was actually at the table, according to Eclipse’s website. What many of us wonder is what really happened in the Eclipse & Williams divorce. Even so, the larger Pratt & Whitney engines may not solve the core problem with the Eclipse business plan, which is that Air Taxi folk need bigger, badder.. and yes commercial aircraft - you know… the kind that make money for their owners.
The more one digs into the Eclipse story the more we begin to see the “Race to the IPO” and get the original investors to get their money back at the expense of a game plan and ultimately the public who will drink the same “small jet Kool aid.”
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I’m totally with you on this. The VLJ craze is just that - a bunch of people building up a product before it hits the market. It’s like the dot-com bubble, and it’s interesting that Vern Raburn used to work at Microsoft. The Eclipse 500 isn’t exactly what the software industry likes to call ‘vaporware’ (all talk, no product), but at ‘half talk, half-assed product’ it’s close.
Taking payload and fuel burn into account, if I was an air taxi operator I’d be going somewhere other than VLJs - probably sticking with higher-performance turboprops like the charter industry has for years now. If there’s one VLJ that seems more practical in this regard it’s the A700, but finding the markets that demand frequent service will still be difficult, especially since the instant that it hits a certain volume the regionals will be pulling up to the gate.
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