Originally Posted by
Albief15
Saw one take off from PFN a couple days back...
My Navion takes $250 bucks worth of avgas to go roundtrip to MCO from my place...I imagine an eclipse would burn twice that at least. That's a lot of coin to collect from 1, 2, or 3 seats...plus pay the pilot, the insurance, etc etc. Not saying it cannot be done....but how many $1000 gotta get there NOW types are there that don't already own a fractional share?
I still think the E500 is a pretty good value for what you get for about 1.6 Mil/copy.
I looked at the Eclipse 500 pretty hard as a trainer, and when we looked at it, with Jet-A at about $3/gal that translated to roughly $330/hour to operate at M.65 in cruise, including maint and insurance, which translated to roughly 1/3 the cost of a T-6 Texan, and even less than that of a T-1 and way less than a SabreJet.
But if they don't figure out all the "magic" and ground the thing, it will not be such a good value.