Wow, what a great thread. I had some idea what was going on, but not to the extent stated.

These business practices are not necessary. A great product should not require a "carrot and stick approach." The eclipse is everything it should be. Twice the speed of a baron on the same fuel flow. Amazing in my opinion. The problem is the airplane is now priced in the realm of other equally capable machines (tbm, Pilatus, used king air, and mustang). Now with this near extortionist philosophy the airplane is doomed. The smart money got out long ago.

An eclipse is probably the perfect airplane for many missions. Corporate travel, medical, and personal jet.

Personally I would take a 30 yo KA90 over an eclipse. More utility, less Hassle.

Spent Christmas in Mazatlan - very nice place and fun times. Old town square was fantastic Saturday night.

If a product is truly great - or even greater than the competition, you can expect the manufacture to make people pay for it. Basic business. It is up to the company to decide how and how much to make people. Eclipse may feel that older legacy jets are not a source of income down the road - so why go out of their way to support a previous regime. Again - if their plane are good enough to get new customers into the fold.

From what both Ken and Ted say - others too - the Eclipse may be that good. Thus some will agree/accept with their business plan - some will not. As they say - vote with your wallet.

This has been an interesting discussion. I'll never be a jet-boy. But still nice to read about it.

That's right. The CFI with Thurman Munson was a passenger with zero time in Citations. [Sorry, Dave, but the CFI could not have intervened--he wasn't qualified in the aircraft. He did tell the pilot he thought he ought to lower the landing gear because it had been forgotten. The accident is not an example of failure of a supervising CFI to communicate with his student; that's just wrong.]

The Thurman Munson crash was all about how technical proficiency adequate to pass a checkride does not give the experience or judgment necessary to fly a jet safely. It is that reality that led the NBAA to push very hard for mentoring in VLJ training. It is why insurers universally require mentoring for new jet pilots. It's why United Airlines doesn't put guys with fresh ink on their type rating straight into the left seat. And it is why the FAA requires 25 hours of supervised operating experience for new jet pilots who take simulator-based training.

My wife took her Eclipse training with John Deakin as her partner. He's got so many different type ratings it takes 3 FAA certificate cards to hold them all. Guess what? Even Deakin got mentoring.

I think mentoring for a new jet pilot is a very good idea, especially for those who were ready for the checkride after just 3 flights .

Ken

Exactly my point Ken, that at nearly 3 million I don't believe there will be much demand for the jet. If there was, the used IFMS jet market would be holding its value, and over the past two years, this simply hasn't been the case. There is always going to be 20 or so used Eclipse jets on the market at any given time, and I think Eclipse Aerospace is going to have a hard time competing against these with their new 550, especially under the current company regime.

I stand corrected with the Thurman Munson Case, I was confusing it with another accident.

And also to clarify, I have nothing against mentoring, I think it is a good idea. I just think the training requirements go a little overboard for the experienced pilot, and there is little to no differentiation between the two. But perhaps that has changed since the Higher Power training days.

There are a few corporate owners who use the Eclipse, but I believe that is a very small percent of the fleet. I live in the corporate world, and I don't notice the jet getting much attention from this sector.

Another thing that I don't notice being discussed is how much it is going to cost to maintain these jets once they start getting 3000 cycles or so on them. As memory serves me correctly there are a lot of cycle and calendar limited parts on the Eclipse, and since there is no competition on new or overhauled Eclipse parts, customers are going to have to pay through the nose for them.

No doubt based on your experience with the Eclipse, you have every right to defend it as you do. You have had little go wrong with it, you acquired at the right time, the right price, and upgraded to a fully functional jet at a reasonable cost. If I had similar experience with the 3 jets I had managed, I would be a strong defender too. Unfortunately for me, and the three owners of them, this simply was not the case.

I know it seems baffling as to how the entry turbine market will get buyer support, but here is a decent explanation.

In the decade leading up to the financial disaster, about 10,000 high performance single pistons were sold....Cirrus, Mooney, Bonanza, Mirage, Columbia, and C206. Many of those buyers could have afforded more airplane at the time, but their logbook limited their choices (for good reason). We have been hunkered down for the last 6 years or so, and those buyers are feeling the age pressure. Those that survived the meltdown and continued to build their flying skills are beginning to come out of their caves. As the economy further stabilizes, more will appear.

If only 10% of those buyers decide to move up. the need for entry turbines will be about 1000 units. If you look at the used market, Meridian, TBM, Eclipse.....there is less than 100 units listed for sale. That demand is going to help drive new sales for a while.

When I went through, it was just morphing from hour-based mentoring to task-based mentoring with requirements determined by the pilot's level of previous experience. Later on, AC 61-137 made task-based mentoring the norm for VLJ training:



Funny thing was that Eclipse initially proposed 30 hours of mentoring for each of us. We balked at that and wanted task-based mentoring. We ultimately got it, and wound knocking off the mentoring in a couple of days of flying. But we obviously weren't all that good even at the end: we dropped the mentor off in Albuquerque and his parting words were, "Fly together a while; I don't want you flying alone until you get more experience flying as a team." I took that as "well, neither of you are any good, but maybe two half pilots make a whole pilot."

Ken

Some have PM'd me and asked about more specific details of the 'Eclipse idiosyncrasies' I mentioned several times in this thread.

Today, I made 3 flights in my Eclipse and had this one problem on 2 of them. Both times at FL390, IMC, single pilot, foreign airspace. The Eclipse seems to know when the workload is high and wx is bad. (It especially likes to do things like this single pilot out of KTEB in low weather when NY gives you a reroute!) I really feel recurrent training is unnecessary in these jets because every other flight is like a sim ride with a sadistic instructor.

First you get airspeed disagree and altitude disagree CAS messages. The autopilot, flight director, and yaw damper kick off when this happens. You notice a 40 knot and 300 feet difference between the two ADCs. Hand fly the raw data you think is correct. (Once you get experienced enough at dealing with this, it's fairly easy to know which data is good and which is bad. Ignore the bad. Then a minute or two later, you start getting the overspeed alarm, and shortly after that you get the stall warning. Even if you are doing 200+ indicated in a descent. It is very distracting in your ear when ATC is giving you re routes and you are hand flying (bad) raw data. Of course, you also get this warning in the cabin speaker, so ATC can hear it screaming STALL! STALL! STALL! when you key the mike. The QRH has a procedure to pull the AOA breakers to silence this, but I have never felt comfortable trying this. The thought of scrolling through synoptic pages to pull ECBs for my air data equipment while hand flying erroneous raw data single pilot in IMC just doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

I have had 2 jets (different configurations) both suffering this problem, and flew a third Eclipse for a while that also had the same problem. We replaced AOA/pitot tubes on ALL of them and it never totally solves the problem. You throw $50k in parts and labor at the jet and you feel good for a few flights, then it is back. There are so many other problems the Eclipse has, like fuel probes where you throw a bunch of money at them and it never solves the issues. You just light $ on fire.

From today's flight:

Yikes thats really scary. Someone needs to come out with a g1000 stc or stick it in the exp restricted category. I have flown a 1.7 and i thought the Dynon avionics were superior. The eclipse moving map was worthless as were the charts. Other than the low battery alarms and failed fuel probe, it was a blast. My buddy was gracious enough to let me fly. I think i will be happier with the old c500 rather than half of the eclipse. Mike

I have no skin in this game (although I must admit there are times when the thought of a twin jet with Baron sized operating expenses gets me drooling) but I fail to see the difference between a second owner of an early version upgrading and selling vs an original owner doing the same thing.

That gives me the cold sweats all over again. First report I've heard other than my own. Mine was out of Van Nuys, solid IMC, busy, and it appeared that ALL 13 warning devices went off at once, at max volume. AP went off, and the transponder went to "Scroll Mode," looking like a Vegas slot machine. Actual changes, drove the controller batty. Did I mention max volume? I meant:

MAX VOLUME

Speakers and headsets. My hearing was screwed up for days, and I'm not sure it ever came back to fully normal.

It is absolutely incapacitating. I have never been so scared in my life by the sheer noise. Can't think, can't function. Kudos for keeping your wits. That's absolutely the closest I've ever come to dying in an airplane.

John,

Did you report that incident to anyone?

Unreliable air data was the first link in the chain that brought down the AF A330.

You call them Eclipse idiosyncrasies. Wow, between your story and John's, I'd call them something else.

An idiosyncrasy to me is something like an unexpected pitch change with flap deployment, or more adverse yaw than expected, or some such issue. Since this sounds like it's common across the fleet, what you describe sounds like an absolute deal killer for me. Not that I'm even in that league.

Big kudos to you for handling it so well.