Personal Jets
 

Vote for your favorite Personal Jet. Poll closes in 30 days. I started this thread mainly for the purpose of collecting news clips on these airplanes.

Wiki: List of Very Light Jets

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

GE Honda Ships Redesigned HF120 Turbofan Engines.

(Flight International, 10/19, Croft) reported, "The GE Honda Aero Engines team has shipped two HF120 turbofan engines with modified fan blisks for Honda's F2 flight test aircraft in North Carolina following a redesign of the titanium components after icing tests earlier this year. The aircraft is expected to join the test programme in November." After tests revealed the icing issues, Honda "redesigned the fan blade, increasing the thickness of the leading edge of the 16 fan blades on the blisk and changing the manufacturing process for the component." Now, some of the tests the previous engine conducted have to be rerun.

Bd-5j
 

Doesn't get any more "personal" than a one-seat jet!!

Friend of mine flies for SMART-1. They give it a different name; it's still a BD-5J.

SMART-1: Photo Gallery

I designed a personal jet very similar to the BD-5J in college. It is a novel design. Maybe I can find a drawing to post.

Never flown any of these aircraft... but I'd probably be able to jump in a Phenom and have her off the ground in 30 minutes or less.

I've never flown in an L-39 but they seem pretty popular as personal jets. Definitely looks cool.

The Piperjet is history
 

Someone pointed out the fact that the only jet company to enter the market successfully starting with a jet and nothing previous was LearJet back in the early 60s.

Piper suspends Altaire program, cutting Fla. jobs

(M. McMillin, The Wichita Eagle, 10/24) Piper Aircraft, which was recruiting employees in Wichita just three weeks ago, is suspending development on its $2.5 million Altaire business jet and cutting about 150 jobs at its Vero Beach, Fla., facility. The suspension comes after an evaluation of economic conditions and forecasts for the light jet market, company officials said. They said the program was on schedule, on budget and hitting aircraft performance targets. Planned development costs have risen above the point that would be recoverable with the current market forecasts, they said. The company held a job fair in Wichita on Oct. 7 to recruit employees primarily for the Altaire business jet program. Piper will cut 150 jobs as the program ramps down. That will bring employment from 850 people to about 700. It also will eliminate 55 positions held by contract personnel. "Clearly, the market for light jets is not recovering sufficiently and quickly enough to allow us to continue developing the program under the economic circumstances we face," Piper interim president and CEO Simon Caldecott said in a statement. Piper isn't saying how much it had budgeted for the Altaire's development or its expenses to date. It will refund the deposits of Altaire customers. In the meantime, the company plans to step up product improvements for its current line of turboprop and piston-powered airplanes, Caldecott said. Read more: Piper suspends Altaire program, cutting Fla. jobs | Wichita Eagle

I was digging around for CAD drawings of my own designs and thought of this one: Wiki- JA5 Walrus. I actually know the designer personally as a colleague, we had lengthy discussions of his creation and its merits and weaknesses. It is similar to the Bede in some ways. He did it as a self-education project. The airplane itself had a lot of bugs but with enough tweaking it could have been a kit plane in the Long E-Z tradition. Not many of my colleagues have both designed AND built their own airplanes like that. It's way harder than it looks.

Is that person who made this from PA?

No love for:
Welcome to Maverick Jets - The World Leader in Personal Jets

???

Not sure where John is from. I think he was working at Scaled Composites when he did this airplane though.

Eclipse 550 Debuts

(11/3, F. George, Aviationweek) Plenty of diehard Eclipse 500 skeptics scoffed at Mason Holland, chairman and CEO of Eclipse Aerospace, when he announced at the 2011 NBAA Convention that his firm intended to resume building the aircraft sometime in 2013. Cynics all but buried the very light jet (VLJ) concept after EA500 production stopped in 2008, writing it off as a misguided, overhyped folly of Vern Raburn, founder of failed Eclipse Aviation (See Fast Five, page 25.) But Holland believes the original aircraft had great potential value, if only Eclipse Aviation had finished its development. For instance, the Eclipse 500 lacked certification for flight into known ice, a full-function flight guidance system and a true FMS, among its other shortcomings. Now Holland will get the chance to prove his premise because he really is restarting the assembly line in Albuquerque, N.M., and the new production aircraft will not only deliver on 100% of the promises of the original aircraft, it will offer several new features. Accordingly, the improved aircraft has a new designator — Eclipse 550 — and will be priced at $2.695 million in 2011 dollars. That should make it at least $1 million less expensive than the Embraer Phenom 100, the next lowest priced twin turbofan light jet...

HondaJet Likely To Be First Of A Family

(10/7, G. Larson, Aviationweek) As Honda Aircraft begins its sixth year, it is advancing cautiously but relentlessly toward the 2012 scheduled certification of its $4.5 million HA-420 HondaJet. One pacing item for the airplane’s overall approval is its turbofan engine, the HF-120. A product of GE Honda Aero Engines, the powerplant, equipped with a full authority digital engine control (Fadec), first ran in 2009 and became available for testing on a conformal aircraft for the first time in 2010. Its developers report “steady progress” and expect to receive FAA certification of the 2,095-lb.-thrust engine by year-end. Although the aircraft program has been delayed by more than a year, the Honda organization appears to be unhurried—paced, no doubt, by the precipitous drop in the global economy and subsequent fall-off in light-jet sales. Meanwhile, it continues to be guarded about the precise health of the order book, which has stood at “over 100” for years now...