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Million dollar Eclipse jet stuck in Colorado hangar
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Marc Arnold had to leave a million dollars sitting in an aircraft hangar in Longmont, Colo.
It’s in the form of a tiny business jet that he can’t gainfully fly. Arnold was one of the early customers to put down a deposit on the Eclipse 500 jet. It’s an airplane that was supposed to force change in the transportation industry by ushering in a new era of point-to-point general aviation travel.
Arnold ordered the six-seat jet some nine years ago and it was finally delivered in March 2008. By being one of the first, he locked in an incredibly low price of slightly more than a million dollars, an unheard of price for a jet, even in 1999. Today the jets sell for more than $2 million.
But Arnold had to take on a bit of a risk. What if the jet never flew? What if it never made it through the federal government’s tortuous certification process? What if the jet never rolled off the assembly line?
Eclipse Aviation of Albuquerque, N.M., proved doubters wrong on all those counts, and even forced, at one point, about a dozen manufacturers to pursue the personal jet concept with mixed success.
But Eclipse suffered some serious blows in 2008. In August it ousted its founder and visionary, Vern Raburn, an early Microsoft employee; in September an air taxi company in Florida called DayJet went under because, as company officials pointed out, a shortage of capital and Eclipse’s failure to install missing equipment on the aircraft; and in November Eclipse acknowledged that it couldn’t meet payroll and allowed employees to go home until officials worked it out.
Then on Nov. 25, Eclipse declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Caught somewhere in the middle of all this is Arnold. He’s where pilots don’t want to be: out of control. Of the more than 200 airplanes in the fleet, about 10 are in Colorado. He had formed a relationship with International Jet Aviation Services at Denver’s Centennial Airport so that the company could, in turn, use Arnold’s jet for charter operations. As an experienced jet pilot, Arnold was going to do the flying himself. But with Eclipse’s demise, he doesn’t have a reliable support and maintenance network at the level required to fly paying passengers.
What’s he to do? Arnold doesn’t have much choice but to leave it in the hangar and stare at its sleek lines. He doesn’t want to sell, in aviation-speak, the hangar queen just yet. He’s hoping that things will turn out OK next year.
Of the jet itself, he has nothing but nice things to say. He’s flown it for a total of 100 hours and says it has performed “flawlessly.”
In aviation, much as with other industries, great designs endure. Even if Eclipse Aviation does go under, somebody will no doubt snap up the reins.
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