The creditors for Eclipse Aviation are seeing to liquidate the company. According to AvWeb, management is not going to fight taking the company from Chapter 11 (reorganization) to Chapter 7 (liquidation). They sent most of the workers home last week on a furlough and now they're all fired, er "laid off."
Eclipse was in trouble before the economy tanked. Of course, they were not alone. When the dust settles from this recession, if you want to buy a new small jet, chances are that you will be buying a Cessna.
With great power…comes insanely funny chaos.
4 hours ago
That's a shame, although as you and BadTux wrote in an earlier column, the price seemed a bit too low. They might have been able to create a more manufacturable design, but given that it was being run by a former software guy (and a former Microshaft guy, at that), I have my doubts. You learn manufacturing by doing it and reviewing your process. At least, that's how you do it efficiently and reliably. Thanks to certification requirements, that's even more difficult to do than it would be under other circumstances.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading a year or so ago that there were several companies working on "space planes" - aircraft with ceilings above 60 miles. I suspect we're going to see some fallout from that industry, too.