Kelley Malcher: May 2007 Archives

By Murdo Morrison

"With the benefit of hindsight, we underestimated the difficulty of this." Thus the always honest Vern Raburn, founder of pioneering very light jet manufacturer Eclipse Aviation, reflected yesterday at EBACE on the almost decade-long battle to make a reality of his vision of an affordable personal jet aircraft.

After umpteen setbacks, Eclipse looks as if it is almost over the mountain. A few weeks ago, the company received its FAA production certificate, allowing it to issue its own standard airworthinesss certificates for production aircraft, rather than having to submit every aircraft to the FAA for approval before delivery.

It delivered its first customer aircraft on the last day of 2006, and on 31 March, its biggest customer, Florida air taxi start-up DayJet took its first three aircraft, which it plans - after months of delay - to start operating by July.

Vern admits a few mistakes: the company probably put more effort into planning its factory and production processes at a time when it should have been focusing on the aircraft itself. He also says "we tried to build the first seven aircraft on a production line environment" when the aircraft design was going through a lot of changes.

That aside, Eclipse now has a slick production facility in Albuquerque that resembles more a car or white goods plant than traditional general aviation factory. It has around 50 aircraft at various stages of production. This year, it will build "hundreds" of aircraft; by next year, it should be turning out over 20 a week on a backlog currently full to the end of 2011.

There are still sceptics. The Eclipse may have got over its certification hurdle: now the company has to keep a global supply chain - drawing on manufactured components from as far away as Chile and Poland - moving. The doubters also point to Eclipse's exposure to DayJet, a an ambitious venture that has not yet proved Florida's business community want and are prepared to pay for an on-demand air taxi network and is more than six months behind its original launch schedule. With 1,400 of its 2,600 orders from DayJet, Vern Raburn must lie awake at night hoping his old business associate Ed Iaccobucci has it right.

Read my Flight International feature on DayJet and air taxi start-ups from last October

See Flight's coverage from EBACE

By Murdo Morrison

Journalists and the public relations community aiming to get their companies' messages across were not entirely happy with the new layout at EBACE on Monday's press day. The show has been a victim of its own success and this year has spilled out of hall six, last year's home, into hall seven, where the aircraft manufacturers are based.

Some of the spin-doctors for first tier suppliers were complaining that - by being consigned to hall six, alongside the FBOs, finance houses and seat-cover manufacturers - they were denied their spiritual home next to their big customers like Bombardier and Dassault. Many end-users, they complained, would simply visit the OEMs in hall seven, and the static park over the bridge, rather than tour hall six.

Unseasonably humid weather also meant the new press conference rooms in hall seven were far from ideal as speakers struggled to be heard over whirring standalone fans. Making a joke about there being enough hot air already probably wasn't the best move.

See Flight's full coverage of EBACE 2007...

By Murdo Morrison

The developers of a single-pilot aircraft which its inventors plan to fly around the world in 2011, powered only by sunlight, rather oddly chose EBACE to launch their latest initiative: a virtual flight from Honolulu to Miami which you can follow in real time today at the solarimpulse site

The Solar Impulse project aims to develop a two-tonne, lithium battery-powered aircraft with an 80 metre wingspan and capable of flying to 4,000 ft.

The Swiss-based developers plan to begin construction of a first prototype next year, which will be used for a 36h mission to prove the concept that the aircraft can generate enough power from the sun during the day to continue flying all night. A bigger version that will attempt the round the world flight will follow.

These guys may sound like Jules Verne eccentrics but they are not cranks. Partners include Dassault Aviation and Deutsche Bank and a host of other venerable financial and industrial backers.

However, they admit that their project is more of a "symbol" to highlight the need to find alternative forms of energy rather than a viable attempt to create solar-powered aircraft.

Check out Flight's EBACE page...

Grob - a niche maker of motor gliders and light aircraft based in Bavaria - surprised the industry when it unveiled at the Paris air show in 2005 its all-composite SPn light jet. Run for years as a bit of an indulgent sideline by the family behind German industrial machine company Grob, the aerospace arm was later bought by investors headed by Niall Olver, the South African owner of ExecuJet.

Like its Austrian counterpart Diamond, the innovative SPn showed that a small European company could still hack it in the world of business aviation manufacturing - dominated by giants such as Bombardier, Cessna, Dassault, Hawker Beechcraft and Gulfstream.

But at the end of last year, just about the worst thing that could happen happened - the second prototype crashed on a demonstration flight at the company's airfield at Tussenhausen-Mattsies, killing the chief test pilot.

It set the programme back months, but Olver and his team have got it back on tracks. Flying of the first test aircraft resumed on 23 February - although the investigation into the crash has not concluded, the authorities have cleared the construction of the aircraft itself - and Grob has more than 60 orders for the $7 million jet, representing two years' of production backlog. A third SPn will fly in July and Grob is aiming for European certification in April.

With chocolate box mountains as a backdrop, not to mention fine restaurants and Lake Geneva itself, there can be few better cities to come to for a trade show in May than Geneva. And EBACE is one of the best trade shows to attend - the convention centre is 10 minutes from the city centre and next to the airport, with excellent public transport and road links...it's almost as if it was designed by the Swiss! Paris-style traffic jams or Farnborough-style queues unheard of.

EBACE has grown tremendously since its birth here in 2001. This year it is occupying halls five, six and seven, with the static display, as always, over a walkway from hall seven, on the airport apron.

Today is press day, when Bombardier, Grob, Hawker Beechcraft and Privatair are among those making announcements. I'll be blogging opn some of those later. The show proper starts tomorrow, with the exhibition and any excellent series of seminars covering operational, safety and regulatory matters, which my colleague David Learmount will be covering.

Meanwhile, for the third year, Flight Evening News will be bringing show attendees, and the wider world via the web, all that day's breaking stories. The industry's only same-day show daily newspaper, my colleagues on FDN are currently busily putting the first issue - distributed to convention hotels as delegates arrive in Geneva this afternoon and evening. The paper comes out Monday through Wednesday and is an invaluable way to stay abreast of the big announcements and pictures from the show.

Click here to see Flight's full cover of EBACE

By Murdo Morrison
The interior of 7X serial number three - I was on board the aircraft's first "public" flight last Friday from Merignac to Farnborough - only hints at the grandeur in which future occupants of the world's first fly-by-wire business jet will be transported non-stop from the likes of Dubai to New York.

The leather seats - hand-stitched at Dassault's completion centre in Little Rock, Arkansas - share the cabin with cages of test equipment. In size terms, the 11.9m-long and 2.34m-wide cabin is similar to its Global Express and Gulfstream 550 rivals: 19 passengers (and a crew of three) can fit comfortably. But, in reality, the cavernous interior will in most cases be used to provide luxurious living, sleeping and working space for smaller gatherings of the global economy's biggest hitters.

These big hitters, however, are growing in numbers. While ultra long range business jets are hardly a volume market - the 7X's pricetag is $41 million - Dassault Falcon boss John Rosanvallon believes there will be over 1,000 of the in the skies by 2013, 40% of which will be 7Xs. And this does not count the bigger airliner derivatives: the Airbus Corporate Jet and Boeing Business Jet.

The greens may not like it but the fact is these personal transports for the ultra-rich and ultra-powerful fuel the global economy and drive technological advancement in aerospace - often, as is the case with the 7X's digital flight controls - providing a stepping stone from military to civil aviation.

Back to the flight. With company test pilots Bill Kerherve and Jean Louis Dumas at the controls, we took off from Dassault's Merignac factory at Bordeaux airport at around 14:45 local time, climbing sharply to reach our cruising altitude of 28,000ft and speed of 300nm (0.73.M) within four minutes. The cabin was incredibly quiet - how much of that was due to the three 6,402lb-thrust Pratt & Whitney Canada PW307A engines and how much to noise insulation - is unclear. But even during take-off we could chat without raising our voices even slightly.

Sixty five minutes later, after a flight which took us over eastern Brittany and Cherbourg and into UK airspace near Portsmouth, we were inside the Tag Aviation terminal at Farnborough. The short hop was hardly typical of the sort of missions the 7X will be used for when it goes into service in early June, but it illustrated the comfort and performance of arguably the most exciting arrival on the business jet market for some years.

After depositing its handful of aviation journalists, 7X number three was shortly on its way back to Merignac, its take-off with the empty Farnborough air show site behind it extremely quiet. With seven of its siblings currently in completion at Little Rock, and another 30 on the assembly line at Merignac, aircraft three will remain as a demonstrator until October, before flying to Little Rock ahead of customer delivery at the end of the year.