VLJs: The rise of the hub busters

By Rajiv Singh
14 August 2006

With the perennial rivalry between Boeing and Airbus continually grabbing the headlines, the growth of the business aviation sector in general, and the advent of the 'very light jet' (VLJ) in particular, has happened away from the spotlight. It took the launch of auto manufacturer Honda's sleek VLJ, the HondaJet, at the Oskosh air show in the US this year, as well as the type certification of the Eclipse 500, to refocus attention on this business phenomenon.

"What I have in my hand is probably the most significant piece of paper in America today, a piece of paper that will truly change the face of aviation," said US Federal Aviation Adminstration (FAA) administrator Marion Blakey, just before handing the provisional Type Certificate for the Eclipse 500 VLJ aircraft, to Vern Raburn, Eclipse Aviation's president and CEO. Eclipse Aviation Corp will now become the first company in the world to deliver such jets to customers. Eclipse's achievement has been seven years in the making.

Accepting the certificate from Blakey, Eclipse CEO Raburn was no less optimistic: "This sector of the marketplace is attracting more interest, more investment and more activity than any other place in aviation," he said. Eclipse already has nearly 2,500 orders from customers, worth a total of $3.8 billion. With VLJs now set to arrive at airfields around the world in thousands, such numbers are set to alter the face of business travel.

The Microjet
VLJs or microjets are small planes whose interiors are the size of a minivan's, and are targeted at organisations that want to diversify their corporate fleets, at individual pilots who want to fly their own jets and a budding air-taxi industry that seeks to link small and big airports. Air-taxi services are targeting business travellers who would not like to waste a lot of time shuttling in and out of hub airports. (See: Fractional Jet Ownership)