"Where's Vern?" were likely to be the two most frequently heard words as Eclipse Aviation's early Monday, July 23 press conference was to get under way at this year's Experimental Aircraft Association AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wis. As scripted, Peg Bilson, the firm's chief operating officer, was to preside over most of the event, whose centerpiece was to be a concept mockup of a single-engine personal jet being evaluated by Eclipse. Company founder, president and CEO Raburn, she was to explain, would arrive sometime later.

The secret was that Raburn was to make his grand entrée at Wittman Regional Airport behind the controls of a flying V-tail Eclipse Concept Jet (ECJ) during the press conference, taxi up through Aeroshell Square and shut down directly in front of the crowd outside the Eclipse tent. While a surprise, the single-turbofan ECJ is not a product, not even a pre-production aircraft. According to Raburn, it's only a market research tool. However, he concedes that very attractive market conditions exist in the four- to five-seat aircraft niche because it's "general aviation's only segment that hasn't been 'turbinized.'"

"I want to emphasize over and over that the ECJ is just a concept. We're taking a much more market-driven approach than we did with the Eclipse 500. The auto industry often builds concept vehicles and they serve a really valuable purpose. That's what we're doing with the ECJ," Raburn told B&CA. The ECJ's specifications and performance indeed back up those claims. It's unpressurized and restricted to FL 250 and 250 KIAS.

If an Eclipse single-turbofan personal jet does go into production, it will be a compact four- to five-seat aircraft in the $1 million class that would cruise as fast as 345 KTAS at FL 350, fly as high as FL 410 and have an NBAA IFR range of 1,100-plus nm as currently envisioned. Due to the Eclipse personal jet's small size, it also should have the best fuel-efficiency of any single-turbofan personal jet.

"People in this industry get all hung up on cabin size. When fuel reaches $6.00 a gallon, it will drive people out of their flying SUVs," Raburn said. He believes both the Diamond D-Jet and the newly announced Cirrus Jet fall into the latter category.

Eclipse has been looking at both larger and smaller derivatives of the Eclipse 500 for more than two years, but Raburn decided that a smaller, single-engine aircraft offered the most market potential. Cessna and Embraer already had secured strong positions up market from the Eclipse 500.

Raburn gives credit to Oliver Masefield, Ph.D., senior vice president and senior fellow at Eclipse, for creating the ECJ's basic design, including its distinctive V-tail and top-of-tailcone, pylon-mounted, engine location. In November 2006, Raburn got serious about building the ECJ as a marketing tool. His goal was to fly the ECJ to AirVenture in July 2007, thereby upstaging Cirrus because it only had a mockup of its personal jet. This goal, though, limited the ECJ to an eight-month design and development schedule. Similar to the V-Jet II, the concept airplane that inspired the Eclipse 500, the ECJ would be fabricated from composites to save time. And Eclipse's core competencies didn't include building one-off, composite-construction aircraft prototypes. Raburn knew that Eclipse engineers would need at least a year to complete the project.

Just as importantly, Raburn wanted to keep the ECJ under wraps until its public unveiling at Oshkosh, so that also ruled out building the ECJ at the Eclipse plant in Albuquerque.

Bilson had solutions to all three problems. She told Raburn about the rapid-prototyping capabilities of Swift Engineering, a San Clemente, Calif., firm with which Eclipse previously had consulted during the Eclipse 500 drag reduction program. Bilson pointed out that Swift designs, builds and ships clean-sheet versions of Formula Atlantic race cars in less than eight months virtually every season and that the aero engineering and composite structures competencies needed for race cars and aircraft were almost identical.

Neil Roberts, Swift's chief structures engineer, talked about the black-and-white urgency of building new race cars. "What I like about racing is the short timeframe. Deadlines don't move. When the flag drops on Sunday, you're either ready or you're not." Swift, for example, designed, built and delivered its Atlantic 016-series race cars to owners in 226 days.