12 Nov 2025, 14:07 [ UTC - 5; DST ]
|
| Username Protected |
Message |
|
Username Protected
|
Post subject: Re: My Eclipse Jet Saga ....  Posted: 25 Feb 2014, 10:28 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
Joined: 01/29/08
Posts: 26338
Post Likes: +13085
Location: Walterboro, SC. KRBW
Aircraft: PC12NG
|
|
Username Protected wrote: It's funny how the Phenon 100 wasn't a bigger success. It would prefer the Embraer over the Mustang or Eclipse any day. It did cost more $$$, but it's a real jet when you look inside. Only real downside are those economy seats!  The Phenom 100 wasn't a success? That's news to me.
|
|
| Top |
|
|
Username Protected
|
Post subject: Re: My Eclipse Jet Saga .... Posted: 25 Feb 2014, 10:30 |
|
|
|
|
 |
Joined: 07/26/10
Posts: 4296
Post Likes: +197
Location: West Palm Beach, FL (KLNA)
Aircraft: 1979 Duke B60
|
|
Username Protected wrote: It's funny how the Phenon 100 wasn't a bigger success. It would prefer the Embraer over the Mustang or Eclipse any day. It did cost more $$$, but it's a real jet when you look inside. Only real downside are those economy seats! The Phenom 100 wasn't a success? That's news to me.
I meant in the owner operated realm..
Lots of them in the corporate and 135 fleets.
|
|
| Top |
|
|
Username Protected
|
Post subject: Re: My Eclipse Jet Saga .... Posted: 25 Feb 2014, 20:13 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
Joined: 05/03/12
Posts: 2304
Post Likes: +720
Location: Wichita, KS
Aircraft: Mooney 201
|
|
Username Protected wrote: Correct me If I am wrong, cessna had no problems certifying the mustang was pretty much on time with delivery and on target with performance, eclipse failing short on all of them with there first jet. Mustangs sells well even though It costs more to buy and burns more fuel to go slower. After reading this post I can See why more people bought mustangs rather than an eclipse. Cessna used a lot of "off the shelf" components, so certification was a lot easier, but it came with the price of weight. Eclipse designed smaller, lighter weight components that are single sourced in low volume. Every blessing has a curse. The world has changed a lot since the inception of the Eclipse. Cessna took a different direction and it worked. They probably saw the weakness developing in the CJ1 market and split the difference. It's pretty nice to have both feet actively in the market when you are developing new product.
Cessna has "their thing" in the jet world, and has been consistently good at executing their plans because in my opinion, they never stray too far off their reservation of "what works." Aside from the bottom of the jet market going down the crapper since 2008, they have been reliably good about developing evolutionary jets and updating their line. They have a design philosophy and manufacturing prowess that has been honed for decades, so they know how long it takes to do a new program, and how much it will cost. This also prevents any of their products from being real game-changers like Eclipse, or at least the original intent of Eclipse. Cessna will likely be the last to move the bar, and if so, only in reaction to other market moves in my opinion. The Mustang was a reaction to the VLJ craze, but even then it was just a scaled-down evolution of their existing products and not an optimized clean-sheet design.
Eclipse on the other hand, swung for the fences and that is commendable. Even though they failed in the original incarnation, it was good for the industry that they got a plane certified, production certificate approved, and delivered a fair number of planes. I thought at the time they bit off a bit too much, or over-promised, for a number of reasons. Friction Stir Welding was quite revolutionary, and they deserve a LOT of kudos for advancing that technology to a production state and especially getting it certified. That is no small feat in today's regulatory world. I don't however give them points for trying to simultaneously create their own in-house flight deck and I think that sucked up a lot of resources and helped doom the plane the first time around. With Raburn and the gang coming from a software background, I bet they thought they could do better than what was available at the time. I wonder what would have happened if they just bought a G1000 or even Avidyne solution off the shelf and gotten the plane going a lot sooner. I think that would have been more appealing to step-owners which was a big share of their market, as well as the mythical air taxi network that probably would've been staffed with lower-experience pilots that were trained on G1000.
Watching what happens next will of course be interesting. I hope Eclipse gets back in production, but from reading this thread that sounds tenuous at best. I'd like to see the FSW fabrication continue and evolve as it offers a lot of promise to get airframe production costs down. Composite airframes are still in their infancy and there is a lot of change and development going on now. Starship/Premier/Horizon all failed with Beechcraft. Lear is working on the L85 and the C-Series jetliner (composite wing) and Epic has the LT going through certification as well. Cessna to my knowledge has no composite bizjet underway, but who knows. I think the allure of buying the Columbia line was to get some composite technology, but they sure fumbled that integration. Their Scorpion is composite, so that is noteworthy. Gulfrstream is rumored to working on a composite plane as well.
We need two step-changes in this industry if it is to survive for anything below the large bizjet market... first is a break-through manufacturing process change to get the fabrication costs down drastically, and the other is a similar change in avionics technology. The avionics thing is possible with regulatory relief and hopefully we're moving that direction finally. The airframe stuff is a lot more difficult, though. We'll need more Eclipse-style game-changers to put some innovation into the arena.
(a big helping of tort reform would help tremendously as well, but that is another debate)
|
|
| Top |
|
|
Username Protected
|
Post subject: Re: My Eclipse Jet Saga .... Posted: 25 Feb 2014, 20:23 |
|
|
|
|
 |
Joined: 12/16/09
Posts: 7310
Post Likes: +2176
Location: Houston, TX
Aircraft: BE-TBD
|
|
Username Protected wrote: Had eclipse chosen to rivet the thing, gotten the engine decision right from the start and installed a G1000, they would be 'darkening the sky' by now. I didn't think that the friction-stir welding process set them back at all. I could be misremembering or just plain wrong. But I thought that part worked out. The engines and avionics were disasters. Indeed they derailed everything and ultimately meant flushing more than a billion down the tubes. It was a billion dollar + write off correct?
_________________
AI generated post. Any misrepresentation, inaccuracies or omissions not attributable to member.
|
|
| Top |
|
|
Username Protected
|
Post subject: Re: My Eclipse Jet Saga .... Posted: 25 Feb 2014, 20:25 |
|
|
|
|
 |
Joined: 11/08/12
Posts: 12835
Post Likes: +5276
Location: Jackson, MS (KHKS)
Aircraft: 1961 Cessna 172
|
|
Username Protected wrote: Even though they failed in the original incarnation, it was good for the industry that they got a plane certified, production certificate approved, and delivered a fair number of planes. I thought at the time they bit off a bit too much, or over-promised, for a number of reasons. Was the billions of capital they sucked out of the market good for the industry?
|
|
| Top |
|
|
Username Protected
|
Post subject: Re: My Eclipse Jet Saga .... Posted: 25 Feb 2014, 20:40 |
|
|
|
|
 |
Joined: 08/03/08
Posts: 16153
Post Likes: +8870
Location: 2W5
Aircraft: A36
|
|
Username Protected wrote: Had eclipse chosen to rivet the thing, gotten the engine decision right from the start and installed a G1000, they would be 'darkening the sky' by now. I didn't think that the friction-stir welding process set them back at all. I could be misremembering or just plain wrong. But I thought that part worked out.
It cost them a pile of money to create the certification data.
Quote: The engines and avionics were disasters. Indeed they derailed everything and ultimately meant flushing more than a billion down the tubes. It was a billion dollar + write off correct?
That is the number I am familiar with.
In a prior life, I worked for Siemens for a little while. The company was often described as 'a bank with a electrical department' (very similar to GE in that regard). The original eclipse is probably best described as 'an investment scam that generated a funny little jet as a byproduct'.
|
|
| Top |
|
|
Username Protected
|
Post subject: Re: My Eclipse Jet Saga .... Posted: 25 Feb 2014, 20:44 |
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: 05/03/12
Posts: 2304
Post Likes: +720
Location: Wichita, KS
Aircraft: Mooney 201
|
|
Username Protected wrote: Even though they failed in the original incarnation, it was good for the industry that they got a plane certified, production certificate approved, and delivered a fair number of planes. I thought at the time they bit off a bit too much, or over-promised, for a number of reasons. Was the billions of capital they sucked out of the market good for the industry?
Of course not, but as long as there have been airplanes there have been dreamers putting money into new aviation ventures. 
At least there was a product left after the capital got flushed... the manufacturing technology, type certificate and production certificate. Unfortunately the sequence of going bankrupt and then re-emerging without the debt burden seems common in aviation these days. I don't like it, but it is what it is.
I won't even comment about what the financial industry in conjunction with the federal gov't did to us leading up to 2008. 
|
|
| Top |
|
|
Username Protected
|
Post subject: Re: My Eclipse Jet Saga .... Posted: 25 Feb 2014, 21:00 |
|
|
|
|
Joined: 10/05/09
Posts: 1170
Post Likes: +449
Location: Charleston, SC (KJZI)
Aircraft: Phenom 300, Bell 505
|
|
|
".... Composite airframes are still in their infancy and there is a lot of change and development going on ..."
As a supplier to Boeing's 787 and a frequent visitor at the Charleston plant I can tell you composite parts are no longer infants; they are clearly here to stay. My wife was very involved with the development of composite airframe parts in the late 80s thru mid 2000s. They had the process pretty well figured out more than a decade ago.
|
|
| Top |
|
|
Username Protected
|
Post subject: Re: My Eclipse Jet Saga .... Posted: 25 Feb 2014, 21:09 |
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: 08/03/08
Posts: 16153
Post Likes: +8870
Location: 2W5
Aircraft: A36
|
|
Username Protected wrote: The plane might be really cool and fun; however I wonder how Eclipse can be successful longer term. Rolling their own avionics and a lot of hardware with a very small base to spread the costs. Well, the idea in the original scam was that there would be thousands of airframes to service.
|
|
| Top |
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum
|
Terms of Service | Forum FAQ | Contact Us
BeechTalk, LLC is the quintessential Beechcraft Owners & Pilots Group providing a
forum for the discussion of technical, practical, and entertaining issues relating to all Beech aircraft. These include
the Bonanza (both V-tail and straight-tail models), Baron, Debonair, Duke, Twin Bonanza, King Air, Sierra, Skipper, Sport, Sundowner,
Musketeer, Travel Air, Starship, Queen Air, BeechJet, and Premier lines of airplanes, turboprops, and turbojets.
BeechTalk, LLC is not affiliated or endorsed by the Beechcraft Corporation, its subsidiaries, or affiliates.
Beechcraft™, King Air™, and Travel Air™ are the registered trademarks of the Beechcraft Corporation.
Copyright© BeechTalk, LLC 2007-2025
|
|
|
|
