Now
that I have to come up with a plan much more quickly than I had
previously anticipated, I'll make more detailed posts here about
various aspects of the aviation and private space industries as a form
of brainstorming. So this post will discuss some elements of the
upcoming personal jet revolution and things I have learned recently.
Flight school of course was a quite enlightening conference, both
from the manufacturing angle on the aircraft side as well as the
service angle on the air taxi side. Vern Raburn and Rick Adam from
Eclipse and Adam Aircraft respectively were both there. Raburn is
focusing more intently on the high volume air taxi business, shooting
for a production capacity in the thousands per year and a one million
dollar pricepoint, while Adam on the other hand is looking at lower
volume, staying in the owner/operator GA market, and a higher
pricepoint of two million dollars. The A700 will be a more
luxury-oriented craft, larger, more expensive, while the Eclipse 500,
suited to its purpose as an airtaxi, while comfortable, will be more
utilitarian.
I was struck by Raburn's confidence. He predicted, with certainty,
that the Eclipse 500 will be certified by March 30th, 2006. A
conference attendee who has put down a deposit for a pair of Eclipses
has told me that Eclipse has actually pushed the promised delivery date
for his aircraft forward by six months from the original date he was
promised. Eclipse is very much on top of their production schedule.
Adam, on the other hand, promised certification of the A500 (the
piston/prop precursor to the A700 jet) within a few weeks. Although the
date is scheduled to be sooner, Adam was a bit vague, evoking less
confidence. It does appear from a quick overview of the web page, that
the aircraft is still not yet certified.
One other key distinction I beleive is that the Adam offering is a
composite frame aircraft, while Eclipse's design relies on traditional
aluminum construction. Until the recent airbus rudder incident, I would
have said that the composite design was better, but more standard
aluminum construction could actually result in a lower maintanence
cost, if proper inspection of composite airframes becomes a significant
issue, as the airbus rudder incident indicates may be the case.
The airtaxi discussions were quite illuminating. It was entertaining
to watch Esther badger Edward Iacobucci, President of Jetson Systems,
for being vague, hearing him say, "I'm not vague," and then hear him
say a lot of very vague things. It appeared from what he was saying
that Jetson systems was looking to be an industry analyst rather than
an actual player in the air taxi market, and it took a while for me to
understand that he actually planned on providing a service of some kind
as well.
The most interesting distinction of course in the air taxi business
model is the structure of the ownership of the aircraft. I learned that
FAA regulations specify that the Part 135 certificate holder be the
agent who holds authority and responsibility for the flight, and thus
the FAA has been having problems with various air charter consolidators
who have been acting as brokers but pretending to own their own fleets,
when in fact the broker is not the Part 135 certificate holder. Pogo
Jet plans to maintain direct ownership of its entire fleet, while
Corporate Clipper seemed to be more agnostic about ownership. One
problem that had been discussed was that if the
broker/aggregator/dispatch did not own the fleet, then an individual
operator could bump a fare for a higher-paying direct purchase. I
failed to understand how that made sense, as such a problem could
easily be resolved by a strong contract between the
dispatch/consolidator and the operator or even an exclusive
relationship. Not knowing enough about the FAA regulation, however,
leads me to suspect that such a relationship may violate the relevant
regulation relating to authority and responsibility for the flight, as
such a contract may give that authority to the dispatcher, who is not
the actual certificate holder.
I very much enjoyed Bruce Holmes's discussion of the future of
general aviation and the challenges that the spread of personal jet
travel will create. I agree that because most people using personal
jets will be flying into primarily GA airports, in the short run these
jets will not create a significant additional load on the
already-overtaxed ATC, but of course we have to continue to be mindful
of scalability issues and try to reform the ATC and airspace such that
things do become scalable. He brought up too the fact that hypersonic
suborbital travel would further complicate matters, because the
trajectories of these spacecraft would be very different from
traditional aviation flight paths. The confluence of IT people with
aviation was particularly worthwhile in the case of scaling ATC because
it seems pretty clear that ATC needs to shift from a centralized
command-and-control architecture to a more scalable peer-to-peer
architecture, a concept IT people are of course very familiar with.
Translating internet concepts to aviation while also making sure we do
not translate internet reliability to aviation will be a challenge.
I had great discussions with other people at the conference about
the technology they have been developing and discussing as well. More
about that later.