"Properly flown" does NOT mean touching down at the 1,000' markings (as the FAA wants), and at 1.3 Vso (as the FAA wants).

It does mean touchdown just "ON the numbers," with the stall warning horn just coming into full voice, and over on the side of the runway where it's not contaminated with a coating of rubber. Early gentle braking with wings level, increasing to strong braking (if needed). 2,500' is sufficient.

You CAN wear down the tires prematurely with poor technique.

Best...
John Deakin
Advanced Pilot Seminars
jdeakin@advancedpilot.com

Might get away with a circuit, but that's not worth discussing.

The airplane wouldn't have met Verne's idea, which may not have been practical in the first place. But the basics were there, I think. Wish he'd had another Billion.

Best...
John Deakin
Advanced Pilot Seminars
jdeakin@advancedpilot.com

John,

So essentially we both agree that it could have been a great airplane, and in itself it is a great, cost efficient airframe both to build and fly, but a wrong turn has been taken in almost every other area. I finally read the history of the company. Wow. I am actually amazed they got past the drawing boards and made it this far. Sounds a lot like Mooney...

Andy

Took off 16R at Van Nuys, and as soon as I switched to Departure I knew I was in trouble, I recognized the voice. Mostly great guys and gals, but this was the premiere ***hole of the bunch. I don't know if he recognized (and hated) my voice, or the callsign, or what.

It was a rare rainy, windy day, VERY turbulent, really solid IFR, and I was tired and going home alone. The procedure is to maintain 1700 until passing 2.2 DME, then turn right to 240, and climb to 4,000'.

In a really nasty voice, "67NV, maintain 2,500, and WHAT are you DOING with your transponder?"

"Well, I show squawking 4434, as cleared, what do you want?" (I turned the AP on at this point, it was very rough.)

"THAT'S WHAT I WANT, but your codes are changing so fast I can't even read them!"

I should have told him to just assume I was the aircraft with the hinky transponder. <grin>

My first mistake was to try and fix the transponder, and switch to #2. In the G-IV it takes a single switch (1 <> 2) to do that, but this wasn't the G-IV. To do this in the Eclipse you have to go to the MFD (center display), select a page, select the transponder function, and select the number 2. (Memory fades, that may not be precisely correct.) It's a real handful in the heat of battle, and I was near saturation. Remember it was rough as hell, getting dark, and solid IMC.

At that point there was a total electrical failure for an instant, then it came back on with all attitude indicators showing big red X's, the autopilot kicked off with the airplane badly out of trim and worst of all, every audio warning (I think there's 13 of them) and radio volume came on, and went to full, maximum, excruciating volume, and the volume control didn't work. I had only Com1 selected, but I was getting ALL radios including the VORs, AT FULL VOLUME. I've never in my life been exposed to such a ear-splitting cacophony of noise. Somewhere in there I heard my "buddy" yelling at me about heading and altitude, but he was the least of my worries. I did declare an emergency, but he may not have heard it. After a few seconds the emergency gyro came back on (or maybe it stayed on and I was just so disoriented by the noise that I didn't see it) and I went to wings level, hoping it was correct.

DID I SAY THAT THE ECLIPSE RADIOS ARE WAY TOO LOUD? (My ears would be ringing for days.) It slowly returned to normal, except for the transponder. When I got ahold of the situation, I told "my buddy" what had happened, and requested a vector and altitude to some non-busy airspace, and sorted things out.

I grounded the aircraft, and it stayed grounded for a week. Two technicians DROVE out from Albuquerque in a truck with a full maintenance setup, and changed some components over a couple of days, but never did find out what happened. They downloaded the fancy flight recorder, but all it showed was a mess, they were unable to determine anything.

Best...
John Deakin
Advanced Pilot Seminars
jdeakin@advancedpilot.com

There you go! I can live with that.

There's a new history out, which seems pretty accurate to me. You'll see my boss (at the time) in there (Al Mann), who was the largest single investor in Eclipse. He got two early ones, and I flew 'em both and his Gulfstream, right up until my stroke (Sept of 2008).

"The Great Eclipse" by Dennis D. Maxwell, by Dog Ear Publishing. The subtitle reads "A Dream Design Bankrupted by Marketing and Mismanagement - and - Saved by a Sensible Business Strategy."

I think it's too early to tell if the last is true.

Best...
John Deakin
Advanced Pilot Seminars
jdeakin@advancedpilot.com

John,

Just what you described would be exactly enough for me not to ever fly an airplane again. This is why so far in every airplane I've owned I've put the RCA 2600 standby attitude where I can see it. What I like about that little LCD gizmo is in case of a fire, I can kill the master switch and that thing is still there and on for another 2 minutes, put on my smoke hood and then 6 hours hours if I press the button. I've even put it my Arrow which I don't even fly much in IMC, put one in my M20S and it will get moved to my Bravo when it gets here even though it already has a standby which will get moved to the Eagle before I sell it.

I understand we are talking about apples and oranges here airplane wise but I never understood why Eclipse never put a little standby in the corner like almost all other jets do.

The reason that I ultimately decided to sell my Eclipse was that, despite many virtues, it was clear that ongoing ownership would represent a constant challenge. Specifically, the type certificate is predicated on a vast array of novel and unique technologies (e.g., proprietary networked transducers) that can't be legally modified in any meaningful way. On paper, these sounded pretty innovative. In the real world, from an owner's perspective, they are frustrating at best -- a deal breaker at worst.

While I'm pretty sure that a competent avionics guy could cut most of that out and replace it with a G1000, you'd be flying on an Experimental certificate -- if you could even get that. Given the heat that the FAA took for suspected shortcuts during the EA50 certification process, I can't imagine anyone seriously undertaking an effort to recertify the plane with a different avionics suite.

I haven't read the "The Great Eclipse," but there is an important element of the story that should be told, if it's not included. A critical part of Vern's business model was to lock in ongoing revenue streams from every aspect of ownership... not just sales of the aircraft. Training, insurance, maintenance, resale -- these were all part of the model. Taken as a whole, the design and unusual certification of the Eclipse makes it nearly impossible to shop around for alternate sources of parts and services.

Although the engines are P&W, even there Eclipse found ways to lock in owners. The fire suppressant system was Eclipse's invention -- an interesting innovation, but the canisters had a nasty habit of leaking extremely caustic chemicals onto the engine (ask me how I know). Many owners found themselves grounded for months, if not years, waiting for production to restart. Not surprisingly a black market developed. There are rumors that some planes were being flown with the canisters removed... and resold at epic prices to other desperate owners.

Had I been aware of any of this when I placed my order for the plane in 2000, I would've had serious reservations. The good news for a buyer (or current owner) is that the reconstituted company is slowly bringing some of these parts back into production. The bad news is that, as per Vern's original model, you may own the aircraft, but the company owns you.

Just curious, since the new company was created by Eclipse owners, have they made any progress, any statements, or any effort to change the situation in terms of everything being a lock in?

Tim

Yes and no. In contrast to the originally heavily capitalized Eclipse, these guys are much more constrained. Even with Sikorsky's backing, I doubt they have the means to do everything that Vern had envisioned. The simulators, for example, are now under Simcom's control. Formerly they were in a solely Eclipse-owned Taj Mahal center that Vern had built in Albuquerque.

Parts and upgrades, though, are still tightly controlled. The, ummmm...., unusual prices that you see quoted for avionics upgrades have nothing to do with cost, value, or competition. The company doesn't want existing pre-owned aircraft to interfere with their own refurbished or new aircraft sales. The upgrades are carefully priced to make the choice of a new aircraft from the company more appealing. They can pursue this strategy because there are no upgrade alternatives available to current or prospective buyers of used aircraft.

In a sense, the new Eclipse is a tightly controlled legal monopoly, enabling all sorts of anticompetitive behavior. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this -- I'm sure the new management wouldn't have made their investment had it not been for this fact. Owners are better off having crazy-priced parts and service then no parts and service at all. It's important, however, that prospective owners understand the company mindset, and that, in the final analysis, you are utterly dependent on a single entity to stay in the air.

The reason they don't have much of a monopoly is that for 2.7 mil you can buy a lightly used Mustang or Phenom 100 with standard avionics, standard engines and companies behind them that will be around for the forseeable time.

There was a big market at 850k and piston twin DOC, there was a smallish market at 1.5mil and just short of real jet DOC. There........

Sounds like a cult. Cool I guess but I'd never get involved. Lots of airplanes out there.

I don't think going with ISS for their new avionics system was a proper solution. "Open" always wins in a long run. a G1000 or a G3000 could have been just as easily customized to their needs. Neither Mustang or Phenon 100/300 have that many extra switches, Garmin can pretty much do what they want. And it's not like ISS is that stable of a company vs Garmin.

They couldn't have just dropped a Garmin in. Eclipse/Avidyne had a totally different (imho better, if executed) philosophy than Garmin.

Garmin is basically a glass version of a traditional instrument panel. It's nice for airframers, especially small cash strapped ones, because it takes minimum design or testing effort to integrate. But the tradeoff is it's not integrated at all. Garmin won't touch airframe control. For one thing, it changes the rules of their software certification to something they don't meet as I'm aware.

So for example on the eclipse if you were looking at the fuel screen, right on the same page you were looking at to see whazzit doing you could turn pumps on and off, open and close valves, even pull or reset circuit breakers. I don't believe there is any G1000 install with anything like that, because it's against how G1000 works.

Remember when Eclipse was designed Avidyne was the small airplane glass, g1000 wasn't even around. Unfortunately the whole fms/nav part of it didn't work so they were scrambling to cobble something together. The transponder thing John complained about for example came about because they had to ditch their keyboard and put a garmin 400 in its place.

Byron

Maybe they should have taken a lesson from Lancair Evolution. Two garmin screens with a 3rd custom screen in the middle. Let's see, 200K for the Garmin like in Mustang and/or Phenom and that leaves them 750K to develop a switch panel/toaster/coffee maker/web browser, or put in a 10k of switches and have a jet that's almost competitive with a Baron...I work in IT and technology for technology's sake has been a downfall of more projects than I care to remember. It reminds of a day I rented a car and my surprise all they had for me was a BMW. Took me better part of the afternoon to figure out how to turn the defroster on. I think the iDrive needs a HUD