Interesting find in Hickory NC

I wondered where it went. I had a number of customers in line for one. I saw it fly at the Nashville MMOPA convention in late 1998. Cool idea, it just never made it to market.
 
Wiki says it's a 250kt cruise, looks like it should be way faster than that, that's PC12/King Air spec
 
Every year at OSH in the early to mid-1990s there was LOTS of hype about "affordable" personal jets. The Vision was one of these. Another was the Williams V-jet, which, iirc, eventually spawned the original Eclipse 500, which was also supposed to use a derivative of the Williams jet engines developed for the cruise missiles (remember them? :) ) and sell for under $1 mill.

Eclipse was rescued (as a plane design) in part by switching to Pratts.

The Cirrus Vision might be the only single engine personal jet contender left. The very idea of single engine IFR (i mean in real IMC) in a piston, turboprop or jet leaves me cold. But I understand the Vision jet will come with one of those magical red handles in the headliner, so we should demand a full PIREP from 6PC in due course.
 
James331 said:
Wiki says it's a 250kt cruise, looks like it should be way faster than that, that's PC12/King Air spec
Click to expand...

I don't think the little turbo-fan engines they planned to use had the oomph to move it much faster. And, like the original Eclipse, the economy budget airframe development was almost certainly sub-optimized and nowhere near as clean as it needed to be.

A good example of what lots of development $ can buy in that category is the airframe clean up Daher did to the TBM 850 to create the TBM 900. None of that comes cheap.

Personally, if I had the scratch to buy a jet I would stick to the companies that have the development $ to do it right - Hondajet, Citation Mustang, Phenom 100.
 
Well if you have the $

F104

Nice Lear in gloss black

Falcon

Gotta keep it real ;)
 
Those new HondaJets are very impressive...
 
I'll have to check it out some time. There was a neat air museum at KFLO back in the 70s and 80s, with lots of warbirds. It even had some early space hardware as well, including a moon rock display and actual space suits. I always thought it was the coolest place.
 
It would make really cool yard art, or a prop for a miniature golf course or the like.

An ignominious end, but better than just turning to dust on a ramp.

I wonder how much they'd take for it.
 
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