VisionAire is seeking $150 million to fund production of its re-designed Vantage single-engine business jet.

The Ames, Iowa-based company has enlisted the services of Tunstall Consulting, a Florida firm that specializes in raising capital for emerging businesses, and if successful, delivery of the first production Vantage is planned for September 2002.

"We've had a tough time, but we're still here," says James O. Rice, VisionAire's chairman and CEO. "The challenges speak to the fact that the last time a company did this was Learjet 36 years ago. Once I saw we had problems, I stopped raising dollars, but we now have the ability to raise dollars again."

The original Vantage prototype has accumulated around 300 hours in 170 flights since its first flight in 1995; the redesign is the result of an internal audit and critical design review VisionAire conducted in January of this year.

Rice says the audit "showed the aircraft should be put on hold until we could address weight and aerodynamic issues, and provide the performance that we had promised the customers. The design review process has been a humbling experience."

Elements of the Vantage redesign include relocating the landing gear from the fuselage to the wings, and extending the wings to carry the fuel displaced by the gear hardware.

The new wings use a thinner airfoil and are repositioned aft slightly. Additionally, the forward sweep was reduced from 10.1 to 6.0 degrees. A Fowler flap and spoiler were added as well.
An additional fuselage fuel tank will carry the remainder of the fuel displaced by the landing gear, and the single Pratt & Whitney JT15D-5 engine will be replaced by the slightly more powerful (150-pounds-thrust more) D-5D variant.

The engine will be moved 20 inches aft and five inches up to minimize duct curvature and the "ice impingement area" -- and thus the amount of power required by the aircraft's anti-ice system.
The landing gear will now be a trailing-link design. VisionAir says the "tipover angle" has been improved from 59.6 to 41.8 degrees.

The instrument panel will feature liquid-crystal-digital (LCD) displays. VisionAire plans to disclose its avionics suppliers -- and details of a plan to sell Vantage ownership shares -- later this week.

The multi-spliced, reinforced fuselage structure used on the Vantage prototype will be replaced by a "totally integrated" single-piece fuselage.

VisionAire says the modifications will maintain the promised performance specifications of the original Vantage design. These include a 350-knot cruise speed at FL350, 900-nmi range and the ability to operate from 2,500-ft. runways.

Overseeing the design changes is Joe Furnish, a former Dee Howard, Cessna and Beechcraft executive now managing the Vantage program.

The next stage, he says, is wind tunnel testing. VisionAire recently contracted the Seattle-based ModelWerks to design and build a two-dimensional airfoil/flap model, to be followed by a complete, 1/8-scale stability and control model.

Production of the "VT-1," the first pre-production test article, is planned for the next 11 months, with VT-2 -- the FAA conformal test aircraft -- following eight months later.

VisionAire hopes to have nine production aircraft ready for customer delivery once FAA certification is received, at a price of $2.195 million each. The company claims 125 firm orders for the Vantage, though around 13 orders were lost when the redesign was announced, Rice says.

By Paul Richfield