There's no way around it.  If you want to be one of the first kids on the block to take a trip on a Very Light Jet, you'll have to become a DayJet member, find your way to one of the five Florida DayPorts where DayJet will debut its Eclipse 500-based service later this year, and begin your adventure from there. 

Flashback to the mid-90s and see Citrix Systems founder and CEO Ed Iacobucci on an airliner … and another airliner, and another, and another.  See Ed Iacobucci averaging about 40 days a year at home with his young family, sacrificing quality of life at the altar of corporate responsibility.  Flash forward a few years to 1999 and see Ed and his wife Nancy posing next to Ed's new "car" - a Lear 60 intended to help him balance the equation between career and family. 

Now it's 2001.  Recently retired from Citrix, a restless Ed Iacobucci is wondering what to do next.  One thing he knows for sure, he doesn't want to launch another software company - his vision is bigger, more dramatic than that.  He dreams of venturing into an entirely different industry.  An industry like aviation. 

DayJet's Astro Operations Center

Using their own Lear as "inventory," Ed and Nancy launched the air charter company Wingedfoot Services only to find their ambitions constrained by the economic realities of the existing FCC Part 135 business model.  "Ed discovered that the inherently high capital cost of traditional air-taxi charter service meant that only a very narrow niche of people could afford it," recalls DayJet Marketing Director Vicky Harris.  "He found that most Part 135 operators earn under $5,000,000 a year.  That wasn't a model he cared to pursue long term. " Iacobucci's next step on the path to DayJet came at a technology conference also attended by Eclipse Aviation founder Vern Rayburn, who - as always - was evangelizing for Very Light Jets. 

As Vicky Harris remembers it "Vern Rayburn was talking about the Eclipse being the Model T of aviation, a jet aircraft with a low acquisition and operating cost, and the idea began to click.  Ed saw that being able to acquire a lot of small efficient airplanes for the cost of one big one opened a world of options, like being able to serve one passenger at a time if you wanted to. "

Beginning with $2,000,000 of their own money, the Iacobuccis organized Jetson Systems as a think tank where mathematicians, engineers, marketing wizards, demographers, and other specialists could design the pieces necessary for a revolutionary microjet-powered, per-seat, on-demand air service.  In January 2002, DayJet was established to fit the pieces together and make them work. 

In an exclusive interview with AirTaxiFlights.com writer Elliot Borin, Vicky Harris explains where DayJet is and where it's going. 

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