One of the pioneers of personal computing has a plan to reinvent aviation. Now if he can just get the future of flying off the ground ...
It's only a few seconds after takeoff, and in the pilot's seat to my left, Vern Raburn is complaining that the jet's handling like an especially dilapidated used car.
"It was too hard to get the nose up on takeoff," he mutters, deftly manipulating the side stick with his left hand. The stick juts out at an angle from the left side of the cockpit, near where the driver's armrest in a car would be, and it's what lets Raburn control the plane's movement. "The stick feels overdampened, and there's a dead spot in the middle."
Not being a pilot, I have no idea what Raburn is talking about, but it isn't reassuring. An old hand at the controls, he got his license at 17 and has more than 5,000 hours as a pilot, flying planes as diverse as a World War II-era B-25 bomber and a '90s business jet. He's the founder and CEO of Eclipse Aviation, the Albuquerque, New Mexico, startup that in 2004 plans to begin deliveries of the Eclipse 500 - this ultramodern, ultraefficient, twin-turbofan plane we're flying. Right now, the world around us - pointy green mountains, a distant control tower, and the thin, gray runway - is spinning like a kaleidoscope in the hands of a hyperactive child.
"Where'd the airport go?" Raburn asks. I presume it's a rhetorical question, since at this point I can barely distinguish heaven from earth. He throttles down and, with a flick of a few levers in the center console, deploys the flaps and the landing gear. We seem to be approaching the strip at a right angle. The altimeter is spinning fast, indicating a rapidly approaching reunion with the ground. "This is gonna be ugly," Raburn warns me as we bank sharply to the left, almost directly on top of the runway. A second later, the wheels touch asphalt, and the Eclipse skids wildly left and right, while Raburn operates the rudder pedals, finally bringing the plane under control.
The simulator's screen is suddenly as placid as a landscape painting, and the technician who has been running the test pokes his head into the pilot's open side window, apologizing profusely. The controls hadn't been giving Raburn the proper sensory feedback; the side stick and foot pedals had remained almost entirely limp. In a moment, the problem is fixed, and we're rolling down the computer-animated runway once again, this time destined for a less stomach-churning trip.
The Eclipse 500's first actual flight, scheduled for late July, will be a milestone for the aviation industry, provided Raburn and his 180 employees can deliver on a bunch of brash promises. The 500 will sell for less than a million dollars - unprecedented for a private jet - and be capable of flying from New York to Dallas nonstop. It will be equipped with a pair of the smallest, quietest, most fuel-efficient turbofan engines ever built for a commercial aircraft, allowing the Eclipse to fly at a cost of less than 60 cents a mile - cheaper than any jet in existence, cheaper than any twin-engine turboprop or piston-powered plane, cheaper, in fact, than a New York City cab. The cabin will accommodate as many as six passengers, including the pilot, who will face a dashboard featuring three color screens - no old-school dials or gauges - that will show weather, terrain features, other planes, and nearby airports, all overlaid on a graphical moving map.
If the 500 flies this summer, and then wins certification from the Federal Aviation Administration, Raburn believes the new plane could do for private flying what the Apple II did for computing - wrest it out of the hands of hobbyists and make it accessible to the average person.
"There's a paradigm shift coming in the per-mile transportation cost on jet aircraft that will replicate the personal computing phenomenon," Raburn says. "Remember in the mainframe era how everyone said that individuals would never want computers in their homes? Well, every other aspect of society over the past five decades has been going toward individual choice - think about cars, PCs, your cell phone. But here's the one big component of our economy - air transport - where everybody has decided that it's OK to go Greyhound."
It's not that you'd start flying a 500 the way you drive a Toyota today - even though the craft is designed to be 10 times safer than similar private planes and among the easiest to learn after you've mastered the basics of using instruments. You'd also be able to inexpensively hail an Eclipse 500, with pilot, for a company trip from, say, Boston to Madison, Wisconsin - and avoid the transfer in Chicago, not to mention the security checks, the screaming babies, the big airline unpredictability.
That's what's so audacious about Vern Raburn's vision: He wants to give birth not just to a new plane but to an entirely new mode of air travel. Call it the on-demand airline. If Eclipse takes off, it will have changed air transportation and introduced the most innovative private plane since the Learjet first flew in 1963. The low price and operating costs will be unprecedented. A Cessna-made CitationJet with a similar range, a somewhat higher top speed, and a little more room inside costs $3.5 million and is approximately three times more expensive to fly than the 500. The Eclipse will sell for $837,500 in June 2000 dollars.
If Eclipse Aviation fails, it takes that idea - and $220 million - with it, churning up some violent wake turbulence for the handful of other companies trying to develop a new generation of lightweight, low-cost jets.
Raburn, 51, has the credentials of a business revolutionary, even if many aviation insiders think he's attempting the impossible. He knows what Apple did for personal computing, because, at 26, he opened one of Southern California's first computer stores and was one of Apple's biggest customers. He was employee number 18 at Microsoft, where he served as the first president of the consumer products division. Raburn also helped Lotus Development launch the first commercially successful spreadsheet software, Lotus 1-2-3; tried and failed to get pen-based computing off the ground in the early '90s with Slate Corp.; and was president of the Paul Allen Group, overseeing Microsoft cofounder Allen's technology investments.
One of Raburn's cohorts in the Eclipse effort is another tech sector wunderkind, Dan Schwinn, who cofounded the networking firm Shiva in 1985, two years after graduating from MIT, and helped take it public in a wildly successful IPO. Now Schwinn is founder and CEO of Avidyne, a Boston-area company that is producing the flat-panel displays for the Eclipse 500's flight deck, which will communicate data from many of the plane's systems - from engines to lightning sensors to air-conditioning - to the pilot in crisp, colorful graphics.
The aviation industry hasn't taken too kindly to Raburn and Schwinn, these two mavericks from the desktop trying to make a place for themselves on the tarmac. "I'm not so sure that people like Vern or Dan are willing to accept the finite limits of aerodynamics and mature technologies," says J. McClellan, the editor of Flying magazine, "and that's not even considering the power that the FAA has to make or break a new aircraft."
"This is an industry where we've watched 100 people try [to start a new aircraft company], and 98 have failed," says John F. Walsh, president of the consulting firm Walsh Aviation. "It's very, very difficult to do, and Raburn & Co. are doing this as a hobby. It's like you have a car and you like to drive, so you decide to make cars."
Raburn believes a lot of people in the aviation industry "can only see what is, not what will be. It's an example of why aviation is so brain-dead these days." Eclipse employees coined the acronym WCSYC (pronounced "wick-sick") to explain why the aviation industry has treated them like clueless interlopers. It stands for We Couldn't, So You Can't - the prevailing attitude that if the established aircraft companies don't do something, it's because it can't or shouldn't be done. The Eclipse team has made stickers showing the letters WCSYC surrounded by a red circle and run through with a slash.
Still, Eclipse's defiant, up-the-establishment attitude will carry it only so far. There's nothing easy about producing a 2,700-pound object that will fly at 41,000 feet. Especially on the company's aggressive timetable, which calls for the first plane to be certified next year and deliveries to begin in 2004. Customers can get their deposits returned if the plane doesn't hit four key performance metrics: a top cruise speed of 408 miles per hour; a range of 1,495 miles; the ability to carry 1 ton of fuel, plus passengers and baggage; and a stall speed of just 70 miles per hour, which makes the plane easy for pilots to control on final approach.
The minor problem in the simulator was the least significant of the hundreds of technical glitches that must be overcome. There's also the financial challenge of raising another $100 million on top of the $220 million Eclipse has banked so far, to get the plane certified and into production, and the marketing challenges of finding enough customers to support mass production.
"This is way, way hard," Raburn says. "The level of complexity is incredible. Our product will have 4,000 parts. Almost everything is mission critical - if it fails, it could cause major problems. I can understand why the barriers to entry for new aircraft companies are as significant as they are, and why there have been so many companies that started up and then failed. This is the hardest thing I've ever done, without any question."
As Raburn remembers it, his childhood was spent loitering around the airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his father taught engineering at Oklahoma State and later worked for Douglas Aircraft. "We lived near the airport, and I'd go out there and stand by the fence all the time," Raburn recalls. "It was sensory overload. Dust would blow up in your face. You'd smell the fuel when the engines started."
Tulsa in the 1950s was a major refueling stop for planes traveling across the country, and Raburn can still list the ones he spotted: DC-6s and 7s, Lockheed Constellations, and even early Boeing 707s. He would wash aircraft on Saturdays in exchange for a brief flight, and as a teenager, he mowed lawns to pay for flying lessons, earning his license at 17 - "the earliest age you could get it," he points out.
Raburn began college as an aeronautical engineering major, but as a junior he gravitated away from following his father into aviation. "It was the early 1970s, and the industry was just dying," he says. "Boeing was shedding tens of thousands of employees, and the Apollo program was being ratcheted down. It didn't look like there was much of a career there." He dropped out of Cal State Long Beach a few credits shy of graduation. (He eventually finished his degree.) A few years later, he opened the Byte Shop, selling computers and software to hobbyists.
Even while Raburn developed as a power player in the early days of personal computing, and later worked as a venture capitalist, it was always clear to his colleagues that he was passionate about flying. "He loved PCs and high tech, but aviation was what he lived for," says Dan Bricklin, a former colleague of Raburn's at Slate Corp. "His eyes would glisten, and he could talk for hours about it." These days Raburn, with his short stature and thinning hair, looks more like a grocer than Chuck Yeager. Yet he is a bona fide aviation geek. He watches the Wings cable channel at night and can insert factoids like "the P-51 went from concept to first flight in 91 days" into otherwise normal conversations.
Raburn got the idea for Eclipse in 1997, when he was helping Paul Allen manage his investments. Raburn was darting around the country in a small CitationJet Allen had bought for him; Allen traveled in his own private Boeing 757. Early that year, the pair flew in the 757 to visit the airplane designer Burt Rutan in the Mojave Desert, where he showed them a mock-up of the V-Jet II, a new private aircraft he'd been working on.
When they arrived, Raburn was bowled over. The V-Jet, with its forward-swept wings, attenuated nose, and V-shaped tail, resembled a sleeker version of Luke Skywalker's fighter craft. It had been designed to showcase a new generation of turbofan engines being developed by Williams International, the same company that made the engines on Raburn's CitationJet. Word was that the new design from Williams would pack more thrust per pound of weight than anything previously built for civilian planes.
Raburn saw that a new, lighter kind of private jet, coupled with the engines from Williams, could dramatically reduce the cost barriers of buying a plane and flying it. He wanted in on the project, but Allen wasn't interested. "This is a guy who owns a 757," Raburn explains. "He didn't see the value in a little airplane."
Raburn and Allen parted ways so that Raburn could chase what he saw as the next big thing. He linked up with Sam Williams, founder of Williams International, who was looking for someone to commercially produce a version of Rutan's V-Jet mock-up that would use the new engines. Raburn and Williams started drawing up plans and rounding up investors. Paul Allen passed, but Bill Gates wrote a check. So did retired DaimlerChrysler CEO Bob Eaton and retired Ford CEO Harold "Red" Poling, who became the company's chair.
Sam Williams, 81, is a winner of the National Medal of Technology and is generally regarded as a genius of jet-engine design. His ability to render engines smaller, lighter, and more efficient made possible the first turbofan-powered jetpack (for the US Army) as well as the cruise missile. Williams agreed to produce his new engine, dubbed the EJ22, exclusively for Eclipse over several years to give the company a head start. Like turbofan engines on the CitationJet and the Boeing 757, the EJ22 has a compressor blade assembly. "Williams is excellent at machining, at getting the tolerances down, designing fan blades that are just about perfect," says Avidyne's Schwinn. "If you have a 1/10-inch gap between the blades and the wall of the engine in a 747, it's not a big deal. You lose a tiny amount of efficiency. But that gap becomes a big deal in an engine the size of the EJ22's."
Indeed, the compressor assembly for the EJ22 is machined out of a single piece of metal and weighs just 1.2 pounds. It looks like a slightly oversize Cuisinart attachment and helps the EJ22 achieve remarkably high thrust-to-weight ratio (770 pounds of thrust produced by an engine weighing just 85 pounds). That's better than anything previously affixed to a nonmilitary aircraft.
Raburn unveiled two mock-ups of the Eclipse 500 in July 2000, at the annual AirVenture fly-in in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the country's biggest air show. One was a full-size model of the complete craft; the other displayed a version of the cabin and cockpit. The exterior of the plane looked very different from that of its progenitor, the V-Jet II, but was equally sexy. The Eclipse was a rounded Porsche to the V-Jet's angular Batmobile.
The interior, however, was a flop. The designer "took a nice-size space and made it feel cramped and uncomfortable," Raburn gripes. The designer lost his job. Now, the revamped cabin is reminiscent of a narrower but longer Jeep Grand Cherokee interior - with adjustable tables and cup holders, a copilot's seat that folds down into a table when unoccupied (the Eclipse will be approved for single-pilot operation), and room for a couple sets of golf clubs in back. A bathroom is optional.
Air-show visitors swarmed Eclipse's booth. Some were skeptical, speculating that the plane would turn out to be heavier than advertised - as so often happens with new aircraft - rendering the engines too weak to carry much of a useful load. Others wondered how the company could make any money selling the planes for less than a million, and plenty of showgoers said the 500 would still be a bargain at twice the price.
Raburn has no intention of revising the price: "If you really believe that you have a disruptive technology, if you really believe you can be a rule changer and a market enabler, you must price off of cost, not value." He says the plane, at $837,500, is "forward-priced." Eclipse won't make money on the first several dozen; however, once production is up to speed, a healthy profit margin will materialize.
The first real test of market demand came when Eclipse announced that it would open its order book. Deposits would be taken at the Phoenix Airport Hilton, and people began showing up three days early. The company accepted more than 175 deposits from buyers, most of whom put down $155,000 each - enough to keep the assembly line humming for roughly a year and a half. Nevertheless, 175 buyers alone wouldn't ensure the company's survival.
It's 102 days before the 500's scheduled first flight, and at Eclipse headquarters, there's an unusually strong sense of purpose to every meeting, every phone call, every walk down the hallway to huddle with a colleague.
HQ is a complex of hangars and offices hard by the tarmac of the Albuquerque Sunport. The buildings were practically given to Eclipse for free by the city, which hopes the company will one day become its version of Boeing or Cessna. (Or Microsoft: Albuquerque was the original home of the software company before it landed in Seattle.) Each morning, Eclipse convenes a 7:45 "sunrise meeting" of its engineering, manufacturing, quality, and supply-chain teams. "It's not very glamorous," Raburn says. "It's about what the problems are today, and what problems from yesterday haven't been resolved yet."
One of the problems today is a bolt that attaches the landing gear to the inside of the wing. "It looked fine on our CAD software," says Oliver Masefield, Eclipse's vice president of engineering. "It wasn't until we started putting the plane together that we realized the joints of the human arm weren't sufficient to get to it during assembly or maintenance."
Since the Eclipse was introduced at Oshkosh two year ago, there have been a number of visible changes to the plane's design. The door was moved from the right side to the left, a more traditional location, and the engines were moved 14 inches forward on the fuselage.
Originally, designers thought the bulbous midsection of the fuselage would protect the engines from ice and birds; the body of the plane would serve the same function as a train's cowcatcher, plowing airborne objects out of the way. But "the FAA didn't like that," Masefield says. The agency told Eclipse that even though the fuselage had been designed to nudge birds away from the mouths of the engines, the FAA intended to have the EJ22 engine tested in the time-honored way - by firing partially-frozen bird carcasses at it, head-on. Another problem with the engine being so far back was that, if it disintegrated in flight, it risked damaging the control systems in the 500's tail. The move forward mitigated that.
In addition to Aircraft 100 - the internal name for the first test plane Eclipse is assembling - the company will construct seven other test jets. Aircraft 100 is intended solely for aerodynamic tests, to show how the real Eclipse will fly compared with models that have flown only in wind tunnels. It won't have much of an interior, or a pressurization system, because it won't need those things for its tests. (What the first and second planes will have that production models won't is an ejection seat for the test pilot.) Some of the test craft will be laden with instruments that will collect up to 800 different data points on the jet's performance.
One version, Aircraft 104, won't ever fly - its parts will be stressed by hydraulic until they break, to make sure they're as strong as they're supposed to be. Aircraft 106 and 107, Masefield jokes, could be called either "beta" or "beater" planes. "We're just going to fly the hell out of them," he says. "We want to find the early problems while they're still under our watchful eye." Aircraft 108 is slated to go to Eclipse's first customer.
On a Raburn-led tour of the hangars where Eclipse is building its first aircraft, it's hard to believe that in late July the scattered aluminum pieces, rivet guns, and tacked-up engineering drawings will yield a flyable machine. (First flight is scheduled to coincide with this summer's Oshkosh air show; that's not just serendipity, since the publicity splash will make it easier for Raburn to raise what he thinks will be the final $100 million he needs to get the first 500s into customers' hands.) The closest thing to a finished airplane is a full-size plywood mock-up of the plane's infrastructure. Its role is to help the engineers figure out the placement of wires and electronic components. With U-shaped wooden ribs making up most of the body, it looks like an unfinished homecoming parade float.
Most of the plane's exterior is made of a special aluminum alloy that Alcoa developed during the Boeing 777 program. The wing skin is surprisingly thin - about one 60,000th of an inch at the tip, according to Raburn - and it feels less substantial to the touch than the tray in my toaster oven. Many of the parts will be joined together with a relatively new technique called friction-stir welding, which hasn't been used before on an airplane. He says it'll eventually be faster than riveting, and produce a smoother, stronger bond.
Raburn freely acknowledges that not everything has gone as planned with Aircraft 100. "It has been a learning experience," he says, standing in front of a section of skin that will go underneath the plane's cabin, which has a noticeable aluminum patch. When the piece was delivered from the vendor, it wasn't formed correctly, according to Raburn: "There was a slight imperfection that we could correct by cutting a half inch out of the skin." Eclipse has since dismissed that vendor and found another one for this part - and many of the other exterior aluminum parts. The switch hasn't pushed back first flight, it's just eaten up some of the padding Eclipse built into its schedule. Still, Raburn pronounces himself happy. "I'm really proud of the organization. I don't say that really loud, though, because we're not done. But almost every day the airplane grows a little bit."
The most dramatic test of how they've done will come when veteran test pilot Bill Bubb steps into the cockpit and fires up the engines. He'll fly the plane for 15 or 20 minutes at a low altitude, try some turns, some climbs, some descents, and then he'll land.
"You do not want anything exciting to happen during the test flight," says Schwinn. "You want it to be a nonevent. Afterward, you take things apart and see what the flight did to the craft. The next time, you try to go a little faster or do something new."
Once the 500 has been tested and certified, Eclipse's long-term corporate health depends on high-volume production. Raburn predicts an annual demand for 13,000 small, lightweight jets like the Eclipse 500. (This number flabbergasts analysts, who point out that only about 800 business jets, and 2,000 relatively cheap single-engine prop planes, are sold each year.) Raburn believes that Eclipse can find a market for 1,000 craft a year and turn a profit selling "well under that number."
He is convinced that the bulk of the planes Eclipse manufactures will be flown by a new variant of the aircraft charter service - an air taxi operator. Since even at $837,500, Eclipse is not exactly a populist product, most non-millionaires would be likely to fly in an Eclipse owned by an air taxi firm - giving them a taste of what Raburn experienced back when he zipped around in Paul Allen's CitationJet.
Two things must happen to make air taxi services viable - as well as less expensive than existing charter services and fractional ownership programs. First is FAA certification of the Eclipse, and the copycat craft from other makers that will follow. Second is the emergence of a new customer base willing to pay for point-to-point, personal jet travel: people who today travel first class or who have access to a corporate jet only part of the time. A critical mass of fliers is key, because, for example, without a passenger in (or near) Eugene, Oregon, waiting to go out in an Eclipse that has just landed at the airport there, the aircraft would be forced to travel empty to a far-off city to pick up its next passenger. And empty air taxis - like empty Yellow Cabs - just burn money.
The success of some fractional jet ownership programs, which work like time-shares, hints that Raburn might be onto something. The problem is that, so far, only one person - a Russian-born, Florida-based entrepreneur named Ilia Lekach - has announced plans to start an air taxi service using Eclipse 500s. Like Raburn, Lekach has never run a company in the aviation industry; his business experience consists of owning a watch distributorship in Latin America, running a chain of 250 perfume stores in the US, launching a World Championship Wrestling-branded fragrance called Nitro for Men, and operating an online auction site called TakeToAuction.com. Last year, he announced that he was getting out of the online business and dedicating himself to the air taxi service, and he changed the name of his company from TakeToAuction.com to the Nimbus Group. Unlike Raburn, though, he's not a pilot and has no particular love of flying.
Lekach initially offered to give Eclipse stock in his company, which is traded on the American Stock Exchange, instead of placing a cash deposit on his order of 1,000 planes. But Raburn declined, concerned about conflicts of interest and the stock's liquidity. Raburn gave Lekach until June 15 to come up with a deposit of "cash, Visa, AmEx, or MasterCharge."
"If they don't pay, it's not going to be a fatal or horrible event for this company," Raburn says. "We've got a lot of other orders lined up that we haven't talked about publicly."
The deal with Lekach gives skeptics more ammunition. "This gets near the deep end of things," analyst Walsh says with a chuckle. "An order of 1,000 planes from a company whose claim to fame is selling perfume?" Raburn acknowledges that the order from Nimbus offers naysayers "a lot of fuel." However, he says, "startups can't pick and choose. Obviously, we would've liked [our first customer] to be Warren Buffett starting Air Taxi Inc." But Buffett hasn't come calling.
Raburn's second-floor office at Eclipse has windows on two sides. One side faces the hangars where Aircraft 100 is being assembled, the other overlooks the Sunport's runways and taxiways. He watches many of the 600 or so daily takeoffs and landings out of the corner of his eye, and when he sees something particularly interesting, he grabs the pair of binoculars that sit next to his phone.
"Air Force One has landed here a few times, and [Boeing] 777s divert here sometimes from Denver," Raburn says. "Just recently I saw a beautifully restored DC-3 that Delta owns, and also an F-86 [Sabre jet fighter] that belongs to Frank Borman [the former astronaut and retired Eastern Airlines CEO]."
It's a cloudy Friday afternoon, and Eclipse's employees are gathering underneath the half-open door of Hangar 5 for happy hour. As Raburn watches a weather balloon float up from behind the hangar, he considers what drew him to his father's field after a successful career in personal computing - and why he is devoting so much energy to a startup in an area where startups typically have the lifespan of sunflowers.
"This is an industry that still has a lot of romance to it," Raburn says. "You don't get that doing an iBook or a cell phone. But over the last couple decades, risk has been bred out of the aviation industry. We think what we're doing is putting back some of the risk."
It would be easy to dismiss Raburn as someone who has embarked on a nostalgia trip with $220 million of investor money - if the Eclipse 500 wasn't such a neat package of new technologies that could change the way we travel, and if Raburn himself wasn't so dogged about proving that the jet age didn't reach its logical conclusion with the debut of the supersonic Concorde in 1969.
"Next year, the year we're going to get the Eclipse 500 certified, is the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flight," Raburn says. "They were driven by intellectual curiosity and a passionate interest in technology, not by what already existed. Wouldn't it be a pretty cool thing for us to recapture a little bit of that?" CEO Vern Raburn: The Eclipse will cost well under $1 million and be cheaper to operate than an NYC cab.
