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Aviation History: Lots of Breakthroughs.
And Some Visions Based On Intellectual Misfires.
Summary: Amid the enthusiasm surrounding the advanced air mobility (AAM) concept, it might be of value to take a look at a couple of past “futurist” projects that seemed to be slam-dunks but ultimately were found to have been based on demand not in evidence and market need that was pretty much created out of thin air and wishful enthusiasm.
Anybody remember the VLJ concept? Very Light Jets. It’s been the better part of two decades since this rolled out with great projections of thousands upon thousands of small, 4-seat jets, based on new technologies at a fraction of the cost of incumbent turboprops.
Adam Aircraft had the A-500 piston-engine, carbon-fiber aircraft, and planned a very different A-700 jet version. After going through lots and lots of projections and rosy forecasts, the company got incentives from a number of job-seeking communities, like Pueblo and Ogden, to put in factories.
No point to go into the full soap opera storyline, but the ultimate end of the program, after years of the financial version of Yellowstone, the company, sans product, ended up in the hands of some guy promising to build airplanes in China. Or, he opined, Mexico, maybe. The eager-beaver communities that invested in Adam got zapped.
Then there was (is) the Eclipse story. The entire foundation of the VLJ concept was to produce a small jet for under $800,000. Compare that to the going price of, say, a new King Air at over $4 million, and the revolution was on. This started around 2004 in earnest.
Thousands of orders poured into the Eclipse order book. Thousands. Not to worry, because the investors were not pie-eyed fruitcakes, but supposedly suitable and sophisticated luminaries like Bill Gates. The Eclipse jets were built in Albuquerque, with an elaborate and elegant delivery facility.
This small jet was going to bring in a whole new genre and category of aviation. It would open new vistas of general aviation applications.
And it was cutting edge, too. Think stir-welding. And the Eclipse folks even spent the dough to develop their own proprietary cockpit software. None of that off-the-shelf stuff from Collins or whoever. Ka-ching.
From the start, however, the entire project seemed to have had engineering that was mostly penciled in. Like, the original Williams jet engines were capable of successfully getting the aircraft off the ground, but not much more. So, the Eclipse was redesigned for Pratt & Whitney engines. Ka-ching.
Oops, there were a lot of changes to the aircraft design, including the need for expensive after-delivery modifications. Ka-ching.
Anyway, all of this ballroom dancing moved the price of the machine up and up. From the $775K dream to near $2 million. That totally demolished the concept of a new market and put the machine into market limbo. And put Eclipse into bankruptcy in relatively short order. Bill Gates notwithstanding.
The Eclipse aircraft has gone through several ownership situations. Yes. It is a Very Light Jet. A fine one, apparently now. But it is not a Very Light Low-Price Jet, anymore. That was the sole reason for the thousands of orders initially.
Air Taxis! Sure-Fire VLJ Application. Not. Now, within this we have the experience with DayJet. Another revolutionary concept that would be a new channel of air transportation – an on-demand air taxi, utilizing Eclipse jets.
Again, it would generate the need for hundreds of these machines, and it was opined that DayJet could be the start of a new industry of such operations. Think about it! Air taxi service on demand all across America!
Started with great fanfare and rosy predictions in 2007. Went 86 barely a year later. The enthusiasm was based on blind assumptions, not whether the market had a need for the DayJet product.
Let’s Put This In Today’s AAM Context. Okay. The point is that in some respects the expectations for the advanced air mobility concept are taking the same trajectory that we experienced with the VLJ extravaganza. Warning signs?
- There is unbridled and unquestioning enthusiasm for the concept and the many companies developing electric aircraft. Not a lot of pesky questions are entertained.
- There are thousands of orders for small electric aircraft, with not a whole lot of hard data on the economics or consumer demand for the proposed air transportation they will supposedly offer. Most of it is assumed, not based on hard data.
- The backers of a lot of these manufacturers include very credible investors. Sort of like Bill Gates was at Eclipse, don’t ya know.
- There are enough swooning studies of AAM applications to fill the entire fiction section at Barnes & Noble. Our colleague Kathryn Creedy recently sent me an outline of a proposed AAM system for Germany done by some professor who wouldn’t know AAM from an ATM. He didn’t bother too much with reality. Lots of these “research papers” are out there and are rarely questioned.
- Like seen with Adam Aircraft, there are communities falling all over themselves offering incentives for eVTOL factory locations with the expectation of lots and lots of job-creation.
- There are serious operational red flags starting to be seen but ignored. Again, the failure of both NASA and Tecnam electric prototypes are examples.
Point: While the AAM concept has a lot of exciting potential, there are also some disturbing parallels with the past.
Airport Planners: You Are On Your Own. The media cheerleading, impressive statements by supposed experts, and the involvement of what may be credible supporters, have been shown in the past not to relieve airports and aviation planners from the responsibility to do one thing.
Think.
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