0 commentsI am still in Las Vegas at the annual NBAA meeting and trade show. NBAA stands for National Business Aviation Association. The coolest announcement I have heard thus far is that a company two companies are working on a supersonic business jet (planned flight speed is 1.8 mach) to debut in 2012 for $80 million. That's a lot faster than the Concorde, which did about 1.2 mach max I believe. Update- JLuc from Switzerland says, "Concorde's maximum speed was Mach 2.5 and cruise speed was 2.0"
Alert: If you come to Las Vegas, you should go to the top of the Stratosphere. Really great views.
I saw the production airframe and mock-up interior from Eclipse Aviation. They are really focused on building a four or six passenger jet airplane at around the $1,200,000 price point. It is scheduled for production in 2005 - finally! I've been waiting since 2000.
Eclipse is a neat company in that they are focused on building a scalable production system. Their literature says as much. Two or three hundred planes planned for delivery in 2005, six hundred the second year, and infinity the tenth. Pre-orders -- with paid down payments, some of them in full -- exceed one thousand two thousand. That's a lot of money to build your company - imagine customer instead of venture capital!
I'm at Kinko's now.... Another late-night print order to make supporting brochures for a few of our in-flight entertainment products. Thanks for reading and keeping up. I'll do pictures soon - there's an amazing trio of skyscraper condos just finished here, looks like Asian development!!!!1