No-one provides a better very light jet reality check than Teal Group vice-president Richard Aboulafia.

“The best way to get funding for an extremely risky new start-up aircraft is to greatly inflate the market prospects,” says Aboulafia. “This is the most over-hyped market in a very long time. There’s an exceptional ratio of hype-to-reality here.”

By contrast, no one is more bullish on VLJ potential than Eclipse Aviation president Vern Raburn, who sees a worldwide demand for VLJs and personal jets reaching 3,000 a year “within the next couple of years”.

The US Federal Aviation Administration is less ambitious on the potential, predicting 8,145 VLJs in the skies by 2025, representing an average production of 400-500 aircraft from all manufacturers.

The hype factor would seem to be in play already, in that the FAA had predicted 350 new VLJs in the US fleet in 2007, whereas only 143 entered service.
Teal Group and Aboulafia are far more reserved - compar

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.