Good Story on VLJ's

You will fly on a new kind of aircraft -- a quiet, fuel-efficient "personal jet," carrying two pilots and four to six passengers, traveling at over 400 miles per hour. The first of these very light jets (VLJs) will hit the market this year, from U.S. start-ups Eclipse Aviation and Adam Aircraft. Cessna is also developing a VLJ, and Brazil's Embraer plans to bring out its four-passenger plane in 2008.

Air-taxi companies -- the now-operating Linear Air and start-ups DayJet and Pogo Jet -- intend to acquire fleets of several hundred VLJs over the next several years, as on-demand air travel catches on and aircraft makers ramp up production. Air-taxi companies will probably start by focusing their service in one or more compact, highly populous regions -- for example, Linear and Pogo in the Northeast, DayJet in the Southeast. To make a profit they must keep their planes in the air and their few seats full, rapidly picking up and delivering passengers on flights of 200 to 500 miles, averaging an hour each.

They will shun crowded hubs such as O'Hare, LAX, Dulles, Hartsfield, LaGuardia and Logan. Linear Air is already using Hanscom Field, in Bedford, Mass., a suburb of Boston, and Teterboro (N.J.) Airport, five miles west of Manhattan.

The initial target customer isn't the typical personal traveler. Rather, the core market for the new air taxis will be the thousands of middle managers and professionals -- sales execs, consultants, CPAs and attorneys -- who travel extensively within their home region. Florida-based DayJet is aiming squarely at this market. It believes this traveler will readily pay 30% to 50% more than a full coach fare in exchange for getting more business done on each travel day and saving the cost of an overnight hotel stay.

http://www.kiplinger.com/personalfinance/magazine/archives/2006/05/kak.html