Breakthrough jet poised to shake up US travel
By Jim Wolf
WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - The head of a congressionally mandated panel on the U.S. aerospace industry forecast Tuesday that a start-up's planned new low-cost jet would lead to affordable air taxi services capable of revolutionizing business travel in the United States.
Assuming the six-seat, twin engine aircraft is certified by the Federal Aviation Administration as expected, ``it will dramatically change the way in which we travel in this country, particularly for business travelers,'' said Robert Walker, chairman and chief executive of the Wexler Group, a Washington-based government affairs firm.
As a Pennsylvania Republican, Walker once headed the House of Representatives Science Committee. President Bush tapped him to chair the 12-member Commission on the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry, which has a broad mandate to make policy recommendations to the president and Congress by Nov. 27.
He spoke to Reuters after Vern Raburn, president of Eclipse Aviation, the Albuquerque, New Mexico-based start-up's, traced a vision of a huge new air taxi fleet that could take the drudgery out of business travel at costs comparable to current ones -- and go a long way toward solving growing gridlock in U.S. skies.
Raburn said his proposed Eclipse 500 jet would sell for as little as $837,000 and cost 56 cents a mile to operate -- one fifth to one quarter of what he said were the costs of the next cheapest corporate jet, a Cessna Aircraft Co. Citation CJ-1. Wichita, Kansas-based Cessna is a unit of Textron Inc. (NYSE:TXT - news) A company spokeswoman, Jessica Myers, declined comment on the cost comparison.
As a result of plunging acquisition and operating costs, true point-to-point travel -- rather than big-city hub to big- city hub -- ``will be within the reach of today's business air travelers'' starting in less than two years, he told the panel meeting in the Commerce Department's auditorium.
The envisaged air taxi services would make use of the more than 10,000 ``underutilized'' secondary U.S. airports, said Raburn. This would make it possible to fly between smaller cities quickly and affordably, provided the air transportation infrastructure was updated to handle this, ``next generation of American mobility,'' he said.
The key, he said, was putting into effect a technology- heavy approach called ``Free Flight,'' which would use the Defense Department-controlled satellite network known as the Global Positioning System to accommodate higher traffic with supposedly higher safety.
John Hayhurst, president of Boeing Co. (NYSE:BA - news) Air Traffic Management, similarly urged the commission to push for new global public-private partnerships to spur investment in an integrated, globe-girdling satellite-based communication, navigation and surveillance system.
Raburn -- a self-described innovator who said he was the No. 19 employee at Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) -- reported the Eclipse 500 was ``on target'' for FAA certification in December 2003. An FAA spokesman, Les Dorr, could not immediately confirm the status of the certification process.
Walker, who served as Bush's chief adviser on science, space and technology during the 2000 presidential campaign, said in an interview: ``Everything I know at the present time is that they're on their way to getting certified.''
Nimbus Group Inc. (AMEX:NMC - news) of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has ordered 1,000 of the next-generation Eclipse aircraft for a planned fleet of air taxis throughout North America.
Rayburn said his company, which he described as having raised $220 million in private capital, planned to begin flying the aircraft this summer and to begin customer deliveries in January 2004. Powered by innovative, 85-pound Williams International turbofan engines that produce a record 9 times their weight in thrust, the aircraft cruises at 355 knots with a 1,300 nautical miles range and a 41,000 foot ceiling.
He estimated that a fleet of 50,000 aircraft would be needed to meet the demand for air taxi services in the United States even if only 15 percent of today's business air travelers opt for such an alternative.
``The realities of today's airline travel experience suggest that an even larger fleet may be required,'' he said.
Commission member Heidi Wood, an aerospace analyst at New York-based Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, said Eclipse, if it takes off, would be ``a real groundbreaking event.''
``It looks like it's a reasonable business model,'' she added in an interview.
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