Originally Posted by Pilotpip
Insurance minimums for something like a cessna 340 are extremely high. A customer at our flight school purchased one, spent a ton of money on the avionics, and ended up with a really nice aircraft. He needed to log 150 hours dual in it, as well as going to a systems course like flight safety offers. I can't even begin to imagine what the VLJ insurance mins are going to be like.
Also, there are already a number of single-pilot aircraft out there that already fill this mission. CJ's, the Raytheon Premere, and I would even argue that a King Air 200 can be considered (range alone makes it faster than some of these VLJs in a long flight). In four years fueling at an FBO I have rarely seen any of these aircraft without two people in the front. It's often cheaper to pay some timebuilder 30k per year than it is to insure for single pilot ops.
I read an article on the status of most of the VLJs, and I think most will require some type of training just to purchase the jet- although I guess you could always purchase one used in a few years and get around that, I do think insurance companies will require a bit of training and quite a bit of dual logged.
I guess I have mixed feelings. I do think there will be a new nitch out there for pilots with jet time flying these, but you might also have a bunch of people with more bucks than brains running out and getting these things, then tooling around in them when they shouldn't be. We shall see.