anyone else looked at it

Save everyone searching...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Eclipse-500-Tw ... 3825733257

Isn’t that one of those disposable jets?

That's my buddy Alaska Gerry's old airplane. I flew it quite a bit. Got sold to another guy I know in Texas. It's a 1.0 with the GTN625 upgrade. It has Avidyne displays and is in very nice condition. I think the market for these is closer to starting with a 3 than a $5. It's one display, servo, probe or windshield from being a pumpkin. There are quite a few used motors for sale right now that aren't moving. I got lucky when I played this game with mine 5 years ago; not sure I could repeat this success in this market.

Other than a FOD incident, who would want a motor? Is anyone even getting to HSI on these?

That bad?

What exactly happens if one of those items goes U/S?

That bad?

What exactly happens if one of those items goes U/S?

Can't you do the old "owner produced part" thing?

AVIO version. Not NG. Same airframe, great price. But I think without the exhaust liners and lifetime limit removed, you’ll be forced into paying money to upgrade it beyond the AVIO avionics. Perhaps an owner can jump in and explain but I don’t think you can get the life limit extension without the extra stuff tossed in. A Draconian practice from “New Old” Eclipse Aerospace.

An ITT modded bird for a good price is perfect (same exact airframe) but I think there’s more to it.

I'd love to see an "owner produced" LCD display panel. There's only a few million pixels to make...

Mike C.

This one has the combustion liners and also has the life limit removed (ONE dumped that).

As I am sure you know, one does not have to make the part from raw materials. The owner just has to supervise the manufacturing of the part. I can call a contact manufacturer and supply a design in some form (e.g provide an old part to reverse engineer), and it will count as owner-produced.

Interesting. I looked up flightaware history on it. Speeds aren't terribly impressive.

The prospect of so many unobtanium parts is a killer, especially stuff like windshields which are virtually consumables.

That should only cost about $10M to make a single LCD screen.

The point is that once a production line shuts down for electronic parts, it is not economically feasible to restart it for a handful of parts.

Electronic part life cycle is:

Doesn't exist.
Cheap and plentiful.
Some old stock.
Doesn't exist.

This cycle can be very short, sometimes less than a year. When you design avionics, you have to select parts which have a longer market lifetime, which necessarily means you aren't using the most cutting edge stuff. Some chip vendors provide guidance on this, for example part A is on the consumer roadmap, part B is on the embedded roadmap, best to use part B.

Mike C.

The windshields aren't supposed to be plugged in so that they work but I know this airplane's windshields are and they work fine just like the FIKI airplane. The guy in Texas installed the diverter strips on the windshields so all the 1.5 FIKI systems are identical. Just not approved FIKI.

I'm sure you could find some used windshields if the need ever came, you could likely do the back alley probe repairs at the place in Clearwater, FL, Avidyne would probably fix a bad screen, STEC would probably fix a bad servo. The autopilot still won't couple and is a little finicky in turbulence. You are GOING to have scary probe freezing issues where the left and right screens give conflicting information and blare alarms like "stall, stall, overspeed, overspeed".

Lots of probables and maybes here in fixing things! The issue I started running into with mine was oddball wiring harness issues with biteflight (think 15 year old BMW 7 series wiring architecture) where a broken transponder wasn't the transponder but something within the miles of wiring harnesses (unfixable).
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People look at these airplanes all wrong. You can't look at an Eclipse (especially an early one) as competing with a Citation or Phenom. You have to look at it as "some guy is selling me this cool little twin turbine experimental airplane for $400K". Who on earth wouldn't buy one of those? Or, rather than get a 2 seat L-39 toy, I'm getting this 6 seat twin engine jet toy for about the same.

If your mindset is the latter (I'm getting an experimental) rather than the former (I'm getting a really cheap business jet), you're going to have a lot of fun. If your mindset is the former, you are going to be very disappointed that your 80% discounted jet doesn't live up to your expectations.