The Plane Truth

Aiming high to change the way we fly, Vern Raburn's $220-million start-up -- aviation's "next big thing" -- faces sudden turbulence.

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If the 20th was the Century of Flight, the 21st is likely to go down as the Century of Flight Frustration.

Getting there fast not only is no longer fun -- it's no longer even fast. For journeys of 500 miles or so -- according to a study by NASA, no less -- you might as well drive. And that was before airline passengers found themselves compelled to spend hours waiting to make small talk about their socks with ultraserious uniformed strangers under the gaze of soldiers toting large guns. The highly centralized hub-and-spoke system -- centralized for the airlines, not us -- now regularly bifurcates and often trifurcates even an hour's flight time as the crow flies into a four-hour series of legs. That irony would be delicious were it not so painful: meant to free us to soar, aviation is now all about legs: the legs of flight segments; the legs of endless lines; legs shuffling as we wait for our flight to be called, usually late; legs propelling us like feed-yard cattle along windowless corridors in terminals the size of small cities, until finally those same legs are squeezed into spaces made to accommodate people who apparently don't have any.

Considering that he has four planes of his own and is thus spared airline hell, it verges on amazing that Vern Raburn has taken note of it. Raburn is the president and CEO of Eclipse Aviation Corp., which next month is expected to launch a plane that may well change the way we fly.

Looking like everyone's favorite sandy-haired professor in pressed chinos and round gold-framed glasses -- the prof who had time for you after class, the one who listened -- Raburn is pursuing a goal so intoxicatingly desirable that everyone (but the airlines) wants him to succeed, even a competing start-up. By the end of next month, when the first Eclipse 500 should fly, Raburn will have spent close to $220 million to create the jet-engine-powered Checker cab for a new way to travel, the air taxi.

The Eclipse 500 is a six-seat twin-engine low-maintenance marvel expected to fly 408 miles an hour and cost $837,500, the price of a similar-size propeller clunker designed in the 1950s. That is less than a quarter the cost of a like-capacity multiseat jet, Cessna's CJ1, which last year sold only 61 planes. To maintain such low pricing, Raburn needs to sell tens of thousands of planes over the next decade. How? The Eclipse 500 is meant to spawn a revolutionary new service industry in which air-taxi operators will fly you and your business team (or your family) from point to point at airline speeds and, give or take, airline prices. No check-ins, no snaking pat-down lines -- outside the airline system, security remains pre-9/11 -- and neither hubs nor spokes. A 90-minute flight will be just that, all flight. Forget two or three legs. In fact, forget about your legs entirely. Park near runway at local tiny airport, fly to similar tiny airport, have meeting nearby, return to office. Think of the efficiency: you will never miss that last plane.

A latent infrastructure is already in place: North America has as many as 5,000 suitable small airports. That there are at present no broad-scale inexpensive air-taxi operators to use those airports hardly bothers Raburn. After all, there were no airlines before the Wright brothers. Raburn is a man who cut his teeth in computing as head of Microsoft's consumer-products division, and he knows this: if you build it right, things will happen.

Over the past four years he has spent 95% of his time raising $220 million to get a prototype airborne -- though since the beginning of the year, seducing investors has taken a backseat to what he calls "keeping it all together and making it happen." That too is part of the money-raising process, because once his plane flies, Raburn is confident that the cash to start production, another $120 million, will flow in. Designing a cutting-edge aircraft like this is a hard slog, but flying it is only one step from having it certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. For plane aficionados it's a rush; for investors it's a major step toward selling planes.

Just as his plane is to be fabricated with a precision rare in the industry -- in which the most common hand tool is a rubber mallet for banging ill-fitting parts into line -- Raburn's financing leaves little room for error. As of mid-April, Eclipse Aviation had $20 million left to cover the $4-million-a-month cost of some 180 employees and what may be the most elaborately orchestrated preparation for a strategic launch since the Gulf War. By the end of next month, when that first sleek minijet leaps skyward, Eclipse Aviation will have precious little cash left but customer deposits.

And that may be why, in August of last year, around the time he was trying to close one difficult round of investment for $62 million and looking at the immediate need for another $38 million to get him to the critical moment of first flight nearly a year later, Raburn reached an agreement with a charmingly brash would-be air-taxi mogul named Ilia Lekach. Lekach's company's announcement that it would order 1,000 planes made a splash in the aviation press and in one stroke validated Raburn's hope: the new plane would create its own huge market.

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