Some Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines

He started Adam Aircraft because he didn't see much innovation happening in the world of private aircraft. "There weren't new products being built," he says. The last all-new twin-engine prop plane to win FAA certification was the Piper Seneca in 1971, Adam points out. The company's initial funding came out of Adam's own bank account, followed by an investment from GS Capital Partners LP, a private equity fund managed by Goldman Sachs, Adam's old employer.

Adam decided that his new company would first build a twin-engine plane with a target price of $900,000. It features a prop on its nose and another, pointing backward, at the rear of the fuselage. Since both props are centered, the plane is easier to control if one engine fails. The A500 also has a "twin-boom" tail, which makes room for the rear prop and gives the plane a distinctively futuristic look.

But Adam believed that the market for twin-engine props was much smaller than the potential market for personal jets. And he'd made sure that his A500 was designed so that, with the right turbofan engines, it could easily be upgraded to a jet.

When Adam returned to the office the next day, on June 20, he called a meeting. "There were about 10 of us," recalls Dennis Olcott, Adam's vice president of design engineering. "The question was, Is it feasible to get the A700 flying in time for Oshkosh? What would it take? Would it be a distraction from getting the A500 certified?"

The conceptual design for the A700, owing much to its predecessor, had been completed earlier in the year, and in the spring, the team had started building a few random parts for the new plane. But the only pieces that were done by June, says Olcott, were "a lot of a wing, most of the pieces for the tail, the landing gear, and one-half of the fuselage shell." By Wilding's estimate, only about 15% of the plane's exterior was finished.

The group decided to give the A700 a green light, and work started immediately. The plane would look like an elongated version of the A500, with twin turbofans on the back of the fuselage, instead of at the front and back of the cabin.

The team was able to move fast because they did almost everything in-house. The engineers and the quality assurance manager sit in one big room at headquarters, with Rick Adam in the middle. In addition, the A700 shared the vast majority of its components--more than 80%--with its predecessor. The manufacturing department already had experience assembling those parts on the three A500s they'd already put together.

The carbon composite construction would make the A700 lighter than jets made from aluminum, but more important, Olcott says, it let the team work faster. "We can build up our own tools [for making exterior panels] extremely fast, and change them quickly," he says. "Our process takes a week and a half to build a tool. Aluminum tooling is bigger and heavier, and it can take months to have it made. You also wind up with more parts, which have to be riveted together, which takes a long time."

As a material, carbon fiber costs more than aluminum. But Wilding says it reduces labor costs, which will help the company sell its jet for less than $2 million. The company also keeps a lid on costs by operating with fewer employees than established plane makers, which has the added advantage of limiting bureaucracy. "Keep it simple is the philosophy that permeates this place," says Wilding. "We like things efficient, whether it's a system on the plane or a process in the hangar."

The streamlined process also meant the plane was a vivid presence for the team. "There was visible progress every day, and it was just incredible," Olcott says. "Parts would be glued together, or the plane would be painted, or the engines put on. One day it was standing on its own landing gear."

"Everybody in the whole company knew what our goal was, and everyone chipped in," says Wilding. In the engineering department, there's a large window that overlooks the shop floor. "We could see in an instant what the status was. The airplane itself became the motivator."

A month after the initial A700 meeting, Glenn Maben, the company's chief test pilot and director of flight test operations, cranked up the plane's engines for the first time. Then he began conducting slow-speed taxi tests, steering the jet around the periphery of Centennial Airport in Englewood, the Denver suburb where Adam Aircraft is based.

"We'd never built an airplane that fast before," says Wilding. "I don't know if anybody's built an airplane that fast before."