Small Jet Engine Plane

Is it a Mini-Jet Revolution or a Dot-Com with wings?

I' m on the leftside of an Adam A700, a fast six-seater dual engine experiment jet, buckled on and cranked it into a row of sharp bends - right, wrong, left. I' ve recorded 1500 flight times in small one-engine propeller airplanes, but that was some considerable now. I' m wondering if I'm ready for a plane with 1350-pound thrusters.

Adams demonstration driver Dan Brand and I drive back to Denver's Centennial Airport and take a turn for Runway One-Seven Left. Even though the airspeed sensor on the A700' s LC dashboard is far away from the old analogue "steam meters" I'm used to, I still keep the airspeed on course.

While we are lighting up, the plane hovers briefly, then it crashes its bikes firmly onto the tarmac. Adam A700 is just one of a new kind of small, high-performance - and, yes, easily flyable - civil jet aircraft ready to take off. The term Very light jet (VLJ) is used to describe a jet with a total mass of less than 10,000lb.

Usually they transport three to four people ( in additional to two pilots) and costs from 1.5 million to 3 million dollars, about half the fare of today's entry-level jet. A number of them achieve velocities of up to 450 milliph at jet liner heights of 41,000 feet. The launch of the jet aircraft will open a whole new stage for commercial aircraft, small business, fractal property groups and local aerial taxis.

"It' s a true turning point for our industry," FAA President Marion Blakey said to an excited audience of aircraft fans at last year's Oshkosh Airport Show in Wisconsin. However, the Very Light Jet revolutionary, chronic obstructed by the absence of a small jet engine, has been a long one.

In 1992 the seed was planted when the outsider of the jet engine maker Williams International - known for the minute turboprop thrusters he designed for the Tomahawk rocket - presented his first ever business aircraft, the 1900-pound FJ44 thruster. Approximately 25 per cent smaller than any earlier civil engine, the FJ44 was quickly deployed by Cessna to develop the smaller CitationJet, the first of what became known in the aerospace community as the Light Jet.

Williams' efforts to further downgrade the engine from lightweight to very lightweight by another score were inspired by this achievement. 1996 The firm worked with NASA on a $100 million contract to design an even smaller pilot engine, the FJX-2. Unparalleled 9:1 throttle to 1 power was almost twice as high as any civil engine.

FJX-2 attracted the attention of Vern Raburn, a former Silicon Valley businessman and flight fanatic who had long nourished the dream of a small, inexpensive jet. In 1998, Rabur-based Eclipse, in collaboration with Williams, began developing the Eclipse 500, a five-seater driven by two FAA-certified commercially available FJX-2s.

At a predicted retail cost of only $837,500, the Eclipse 500 had more than 2,000 pre-orders as it made preparations for its first test mission in the summer of 2002. However, the first EJ22 prototype, the FJX-2 commercially available model, turned out to be problematic. Eclipse took six Weeks to put two of them into operation simultaneously, and the thrusters could not reach their anticipated thrusts without being overheated.

Eclipse was reluctant to conclude after an anaemic test that the EJ22 would not chop it. A contract was quickly entered into with Pratt & Whitney to produce a smaller variant of a more traditional engine. In 2004 the reincarnated Eclipse 500 was flying with 900 pound thrusts of the PW610Fs; the FAA approved the aircraft in September 2006.

Following disappointing lags due to continuing disruptions in the aircraft's sophisticated aviation electronics and commissioning issues, the first delivery of the Elipse 500 to a client took place in December 2006. The overwhelming backlog of orders from ECOlipse prompted a number of other vendors to produce Very Light Jet prototype. The FAA is currently certifying nine more TLJs, among them the Adam A700.

DayJet, a start-up airport taxis operator, is the biggest Eclipse 500 client and will connect five medium-sized Florida towns. Ed Iacobucci, another technological vet and DayJet creator, met Vern Raburn at a 2001 technological meeting and they got along well. lacobucci ordered 239 eclipse 500s.

DayJet travellers will be able to travel between Boca Raton, Gainesville, Lakeland, Pensacola and Tallahassee this year. DayJet's economical solution is a sophisticated set of airplane optimisation tools Astro. Astro charges the most cost-effective route for one of 10 Eclipse 500s commuting between the five towns when a client makes a booking.

Within a tariff system called "time arbitrage" by Iacobucci, Astro will offer a price between 1 and 3 dollars per kilometer according to the departures and arrivals hours. This compares to the unlimited bus prices for regular services within Florida, which are usually between $1.50 and $2.00 per mil. By the end of 2008, DayJet is hoping to operate 300 Eclipse 500s and 40 local airport services in the southeast.

Further promising VLJ Luftaxi service offerings are Pogoair ( whose former chief executive of American Airlines is Robert Crandall) and Linearir, which is already operating in the northeast with Cessna Caravan turbo-props as a standby for its long-awaited Eclipse 500. Emerging aerial taxis have placed more than half of Eclipse's orders - about 1500 in total.

The question of how many of these start-ups will be able to increase their stake in the $2 billion will remain to be seen - more than necessary to cover the aircraft ordered. He takes over the Very Light Jet/Air Trip vehicle operations for prospective investors: When very light aircraft meet their buzz, engine and cabin makers may be trying to lift the privately owned jet bars by reducing weights and costs.

A very light jet, driven by a 500 pound high performance 500 pound thruster turbo fan engine, could transport two people at 250 mbph and receive 30 mbps. Adam A700, which will be available next year.