Eclipse Aviation is struggling to supply to keen European buyers of the Eclipse 500 very light jet the product that they would get if they were US-based. “The fact is,” says Eclipse’s vice president marketing and sales Michael McConnell, “we have sold over 100 aircraft to owner-operators in Europe, and we have three different fleet operators we are working with. All I can say is it’s amazing we have sold those, we have amazing customers and we know we have to have a solution for them.”
McConnell says that, by the first quarter of 2008, Eclipse expects to be able to deliver a service to European customers that is equivalent to the “Jet Complete” training, maintenance, spares, insurance and flight information support package the manufacturer provides to US buyers of the Eclipse 500. The company says it does not consider its product support to be a profit centre, but a part of the product.
McConnell explains the situation as best he can. In Europe Jet Complete will - at first - be provided by licensed organisations. Eventually, according to McConnell, it will be supplied worldwide by Eclipse direct. In the meanwhile, he admits, it is proving difficult to find partners to provide a licensed support service of the type Eclipse will happily put its name to. A buyer asked McConnell when the service would be available. He replied: “We are supposed to deliver our first aeroplane into Europe in the fourth quarter of this year, and I would hate to have to tell him ‘I’ll FedEx you parts whenever you break’.”
For pilot training, says McConnell, Eclipse has a partner in Amsterdam called FSC: it will oversee all Eclipse 500 pilot training programmes that are now carried out in the USA, but the date for it to come into operation is not yet fixed. It will be fixed “when we have enough volume and enough pilots to train here in Europe – it could be the end of 2008, it could be 2009,” says McConnell.
Meanwhile, in the USA, the first two full motion simulators, manufactured by Florida based Opinicus for type rating training will be delivered to Eclipse’s Albuquerque base in August, and they will be fully “up and running” by the end of the year, says McConnell.
Source: Flight Daily News
