Flightglobal:

Eclipse Aviation today filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection but simultaneously announced an offer for the sale of its assets for a combination of cash, equity and debt to an affiliate of Etirc Aviation, its largest shareholder. The company says the proposed sale will be subject ...

Author: John Croft

Date: 25 November 2008

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This certainly doesn't qualify as a shocking turn of events, and is likely the only way that Eclipse can ever hope to book a profit. Vern Raburn, though visionary and a driving force, was hopelessly unprepared for the transition from the computer and electronics industry to one as highly regulated as aviation. The continually "success-driven" performance targets and schedules set for the program failed to allow any wriggle room for the inevitable development setbacks. The management of Eclipse, along with countless other managers today, never took the fact that it is very difficult to schedule technological breakthroughs with any degree of accuracy.

And there was another big and naive assumption that Eclipse's sure fire path to success was the sale of 200 to 400 VLJs to Day One. Well the Iacobbucci's dream was exactly that, something forged in a computer-programming genius mind that lacked even a small measure of realism: how in hell's name Iacobucci thought that there were thousands of businessmen living way north from Miami and Ft. Lauderdale willing to cough up at least 400 bucks for a short flight from Boca Raton to Gainesville (as opposed to $ 150 on American or any other commuter airline) in a cramped plane that lacked a simple but totally necessary convenience: a john. What if somebody had to answer mother nature's calls, in a hurry, tell the pilot to make an emergency descent or else the plane would become a latrine, and pay twice as much the going airline rate.