Make room for microjets
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, January 18, 2006
WASHINGTON – America’s already crowded skies are about to become still more congested.
Taking off for the first time this year will be small, speedy, cheap jets that big airlines worry will cause traffic jams around major metropolitan areas.
Called microjets or very light jets (dubbed VLJs), they’ve been likened to sport utility vehicles with wings. With two engines and seating capacity for five or six people, they cost half as much as the cheapest business jet now in service.
Three thousand of the little jets are on order at three manufacturers. Albuquerque, N.M.-based Eclipse Aviation has 2,350 on back order and expects to receive Federal Aviation Administration certification for its E500 by June. The first E500 – which takes less than five days to make – will be delivered 10 days later.
The FAA and airline pilots are wary of the sudden emergence of a new class of jets. But Vern Raburn, founder of Eclipse Aviation, scoffs at the notion that VLJs will blacken the skies.
The airlines and manufacturers that have been around for decades have the attitude, Raburn said, that “if it hasn’t been done before, it can’t be done or it won’t be done or it shouldn’t be done.”
“The question is exactly where they’re going to be flying,” said FAA chief Marion Blakey. “How much is in congested airspace? It’s probably not knowable at this point.”
Supporters of the little jets predict they will go to out-of-the way sites in the empty skies and land at the more than 5,000 small, underused airports.
“We’re going to offer service where the airlines don’t,” Raburn said.
Duane Woerth, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, the largest pilots union, said it’s more likely the new jets will swarm into the airspace above the 35 biggest airports, through which 95 percent of all air passengers travel.
“A lot of these guys aren’t going to want to go to a farm patch in Scribner, Neb.,” he said.
The FAA predicts at least 4,500 VLJs will be in service 10 years from now, though Blakey concedes that’s a conservative estimate. NASA projects 20,000 in 2010.
To the radar scope and the controller, there’s no difference between a little jet and a jumbo jet.
If only 2 percent of commercial air passengers move from jetliners to very light jets, Blakey said, that will triple the number of takeoffs and landings that air traffic controllers have to handle.
“You say, ‘Whew, we’re going to have to be prepared for this phenomenon,’ ” Blakey said.
The FAA is moving away from navigation by controllers on the ground to navigation by pilots in the cockpit using the satellite-based Global Positioning System and powerful computers.
Satellite-based navigation will permit more airplanes to fly closer together, Blakey said. He believes VLJs will prod the government to push more quickly toward a satellite-based navigation system.
Blakey is concerned that VLJs will clog the single-lane highways in the sky above 18,000 feet, where large jets fly. Unlike turboprops, which cruise below 30,000 feet, VLJs cruise at the same altitude as jetliners – between 30,000 and 40,000 feet. But they cruise at 430 miles per hour, considerably slower than a 737, which flies at 500 mph.
