Some Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines

Joe Wilding scanned the skies over Oshkosh, Wisconsin, looking for the jet aircraft he'd helped build. Wilding and his colleagues at Adam Aircraft had de- cided just six weeks earlier to sprint and finish their plane in time for Oshkosh's big summer air show, but now none of them knew exactly which runway their A700 would land on.

In the aviation world, the A700's appearance would be one of the biggest surprise debuts ever. No one at the Oshkosh show, formally known as EAA AirVenture 2003, expected Adam Aircraft Industries, a Colorado startup, to arrive with its jet. The company had announced the aircraft--its second product--only a year ago. (Its first was the A500, an innovative twin-engine prop plane.)

It would be inaccurate to say that Wilding, the project engineer for the A700, would be surprised to see the A700 touch down at Oshkosh. Relieved is the better word. The plane had taken to the skies for its inaugural test flight just four days before. It had flown for a grand total of 15 hours since then, and was still a work in progress. The cabin wasn't pressurized, so the pilots had to wear oxygen masks in the cockpit. There were no seats or carpeting in the cabin. The landing gear stayed down, since the hydraulic system to retract it hadn't been installed yet.

Adam Aircraft's A700 is just one entrant in a race to build the first of a new generation of small jets. Often called "light business jets" or "personal jets," these pint-size planes hold fewer than eight passengers. They use newer, more fuel-efficient turbofan engines to slash the operating costs of the current generation of gas-guzzling private planes. And the sticker price is half what you'd shell out for your own set of wings today--much less in some cases. The A700 is projected to cost just under $2 million; an entry-level Cessna Citation goes for about $4 million.

The company that produces the first reliable personal jet could find itself at the forefront of a new industry. A cheaper jet won't end up in suburban garages, but it will allow more business travelers to use private planes the same way they use car services or cabs today and make it possible for more mid-size companies to operate their own fleets. "The first generation of passenger planes, like the Boeing 707, were like mainframe computers," says Rick Adam, the chief executive at Adam Aircraft. "You fly on the airline's terms, and their timetables. We're going to be like PCs compared to the big jets."

But Adam is competing with a half-dozen other hungry young companies, including Eclipse Aviation and Safire Aircraft, as well as established players like Cessna, to address the demand for personal jets. Even Honda has announced plans to build its own prototype personal jet--the Civic of the skies.

And so the race is on. One hundred years after the Wright Brothers first took flight at Kitty Hawk, few things remain more challenging--or dangerous--than building a plane from scratch and getting the Federal Aviation Administration to approve it for sale to the public. In January, a Florida company designing its own personal jet lost its chief test pilot in a crash caused, regulators say, by a landing-gear malfunction. Pieces of the plane were found in trees near the airport, 35 feet above the ground.

Now, on this last day of July, the test pilots flying the A700 had called from the airport at Waterloo, Iowa, during a refueling stop on their way to Oshkosh. But Joe Wilding would have been happier once the plane was on the ground in Wisconsin. He clutched a pair of binoculars and listened to a handheld scanner that was tuned in to the control tower's frequency.

June 19, 2003

At a banquet dinner at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Rick Adam had batted the idea around with a few of his employees: What if they tried to finish the A700 in time for a cameo at the air show at Oshkosh?

The young company, founded in 1998 while Adam was still running his previous startup, had already built its unique-looking twin-engine prop plane, the A500. But that twin-tailed plane, which seats six and is made of lightweight carbon composite materials, was still wending its way through the FAA certification process.

Adam felt good about the company's momentum. Earlier in his career, he had been chief information officer at Goldman Sachs. He then went on to start New Era of Networks, a software company. He took that company public, selling it to Sybase, a more established business software maker in the Bay Area.

More relevant to the aviation industry, as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, he'd worked on the mission-control computers for Apollo lunar missions 8 through 14. Adam kept his pilot's license current, and as chief executive of New Era of Networks, he often flew himself between Denver and New York on a Cessna CJ1, the low-end Citation Jet, and a Citation VII.

One hundred years after Kitty Hawk, few things are as challenging--or as dangerous--as building a new plane from scratch.