Personal Jets: Private Aviation on a Budget

Blair Watson
Aviation.com
Aviation.com Fri Jul 25, 4:15 PM ET

They're fast, they're dinky, and soon they'll be coming to an airport near you. They are called personal jets.

Most are powered by a single jet engine small enough to fit in the trunk of the average passenger car. The engines most often chosen by the companies designing and building new personal jets are versions of the popular Williams FJ33 or FJ44 "fanjets" - the FJ33 line generates from 1,000 to 1,900 pounds of thrust and the slightly larger FJ44 family produces from 1,900 to 3,600 pounds of thrust - or the hot-selling Pratt & Whitney Canada PW600 series.

These tiny personal jets are even smaller than the very light jets (VLJs) that have been making headlines for the past few years. Personal jets will be nearly as fast as VLJs but will be less expensive to acquire and operate.

New personal-jet models include Diamond Aircraft Industries' D-JET, the PiperJet (built by Piper Aircraft), Cirrus Design's Vision SJ50, Epic Aircraft's Victory, and the EA-400 by Eclipse Aviation - which is the manufacturer of the popular but controversial EA-500, the aircraft that has led the VLJ movement.

Their advent appears well-timed. Fuel prices remain near record highs but business people still need to fly for business and other reasons. As a result, the forthcoming generation of personal jets has captured the attention of companies or individuals who have enough money to buy private jet transport but have to be careful with their budgets.

With the exception of the D-JET, these personal jets are being developed and built in the United States. Austria-based Diamond Aircraft Industries has its North American headquarters and manufacturing facilities in London, Ontario.

Cirrus Design, which makes the highly popular SR20 and SR22 lines of single-piston-engine light aircraft, flew the Vision SJ50 for the first time on July 3.

"The SJ50 offers owner-pilots access to more lifestyle pursuits than any other personal aircraft to date. Just as important, it does so without conflicting with airline operations," said Alan Klapmeier, Cirrus CEO and co-founder, at a recent meeting of SJ50 customers. "The 'Vision' cruises below airline flight levels and offers easy and convenient access to thousands of local airports not served by airline operations."

Cheaper to own and operate than VLJs

Personal jets will cost approximately 25 percent to 50 percent less than VLJs. For example, the D-JET costs $1.4 million, while the compact EA-500 VLJ is $1.9 million. The PiperJet, one of the fastest and highest-flying personal jets, is expected to cost $2.2 million, whereas $3 million will get you an Embraer Phenom 100 VLJ, which is now in flight-test and which is expected to set the standard for airline-style scheduled air taxi operations with very light jets.

"The D-JET is intended to provide the most desirable and attainable jet to a broad range of pilot and non-pilot air travelers, combining the executive cabin class seating comfort of much more expensive business jets with the lowest possible acquisition and operating cost," said Peter Maurer, president of Diamond Aircraft, in a recent statement.

Because personal jets are propelled by a single engine and have been developed with the latest technologies, their hourly operating costs are expected to be 60 percent to 75 percent less than those of most six-passenger business jets, which on average would cost at least $10,000 to charter for round-trip flights of up to two hours each way. In contrast, Toronto-based Chartright said last month that it will offer a charter rate of less than $4,000 for operating the same round-trips with any of the 10 five-passenger D-JETs it has ordered.

The technology used in personal jets includes satellite-based navigation instruments, weight-saving carbon fiber reinforced plastic for the fuselage and other components, and in the SJ50's case, an whole-aircraft parachute that the pilot can deploy in case of an engine failure to allow the aircraft to float to the ground. Cirrus has plenty of experience with this feature: All its existing light planes are fitted with similar parachutes, and flight emergencies have led to dozens of successful parachute deployments.

Flight-testing of some models is already underway and most of the newly developed personal-jet designs are expected to receive FAA operational certification by late 2010.

New, but not new

Although they represent the coming generation, personal jets represent an evolution of a long-term trend in business-aircraft design rather than a revolution.

The private small jet was the brainchild of American inventor and businessman, Bill Lear. In October 1964, his company began flight-testing the six-passenger Learjet 23 and subsequently delivered 104 of the type. Other Learjet models followed. A well-known 'Learism' in the aviation industry was, "If it looks good, it will fly good."

In 1977, the Cessna Aircraft Company of Wichita, Kans. began manufacturing the seven-seat Citation 500 SP (Single Pilot) jet. Over the next eight years, 312 aircraft were sold, many to pilot-owners wanting the speed and convenience of a jet to fulfill their personal travel requirements.

While small jets fly about twice as fast as propeller airplanes, models such as the Citation 500 SP consume a lot more fuel. Technological advances in the latter 1980s and early 1990s in jet engines, avionics (cockpit instruments and electronics) and other airplane systems allowed Cessna to develop a fuel-efficient, five-passenger private jet: the CitationJet. Over the past 15 years, Cessna has built and delivered nearly 700 CitationJets, including several to private pilot-owners.

"The CitationJet has introduced hundreds of turboprop operators and previous non-owners to the advantages and efficiency of a business jet," Roger Whyte, Cessna's senior vice president of sales and marketing, said in October 1998.

The success of six- and eight-passenger business jets spawned today's VLJs, which (depending on the model) seat from three to seven passengers behind the pilot(s). In addition to the EA-500 and the Phenom 100, popular VLJ models include the Cessna Mustang and the unusual Honda HA-420 HondaJet, which has a jet engine mounted on top of each wing.

Several of tomorrow's personal jet models rely on similarly unconventional design thinking. The SJ50 Vision, for instance, has a V-tail and its engine mounted centrally on its spine behind the passenger cabin. The Epic Victory has a long, curving intake protruding out in front of its tail to feed air to the engine, which is buried in the rear fuselage and which exhausts through a nozzle at the rear of the aircraft.