Now a new generation of aviation entrepreneurs is seeking to change the air-travel equation. They’re the equivalent of today’s space mavericks, entirely rethinking how the big boys conduct business. Their concept is called the air taxi, and you can think of it as a friendly neighborhood Checker cab with wings, ready to drop you off at any one of the nation’s thousands of smaller airports, which aren’t used by the major airliners. “In the world of aviation, if a market doesn’t exist, it’s interpreted as proof it can’t exist,” says Vern Raburn, the founder of an Albuquerque, N.M., company called Eclipse Aviation Corp. “We fight this.”
Raburn knows all about society-altering innovations. As one of the first entrepreneurs in the PC industry, he joined Microsoft in the mid-’70s and made a bundle. Bill Gates was best man at his wedding. A licensed pilot and member of several corporate boards in the ’90s, he found himself logging 1,000 hours in 22 months on his private jet, and knew he could never have pulled off his brutal schedule taking regular planes. Eclipse was founded in 1998 to build an airplane cheap and nimble enough for regional taxi services–which don’t yet exist, but Raburn thinks they will–and to “enable a new layer of the aviation infrastructure.” Gates and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen chipped in millions in seed money to send the venture down the runway.
Raburn immediately found out that radically changing the air-travel industry is harder than it looks. He tried to innovate on several fronts, bringing digital technology to the plane’s control systems and manufacturing process, and commissioning a lightweight, low-cost turbofan jet engine from aircraft-engine designer Sam Williams. Williams’s firm failed to concoct the technology for the brand-new design, and Raburn had to switch to another, less advanced engine from Pratt & Whitney, losing two years of development time.
The Eclipse 500, now due in 2006, will have room for five passengers, use 40 percent less runway than the smallest jets and cost $1 million, about a quarter of the price tag of current private planes made by Cessna and Raytheon. Raburn says he already has 2,100 orders for the Eclipse. Another company, the Denver-based Adam Aircraft, says it has just started accepting orders for its slightly more expensive and larger plane, the A700 jet, which should be available by the end of 2004. Soon when you get to the airport, instead of heading to the ticket line you might be hailing a cab.
