Vern Raburn
President and CEO, Eclipse Aviation Corporation
Eclipse Aviation CEO Vern Raburn typifies the kind of entrepreneur that made the personal computer an everyday device… and that could ultimately create the personal airplane as well.
We first met him back in the early 80s when he was employee number 18 at Microsoft, a scrappy little company run by an ambitious geek (called Bill Gates). From Microsoft he moved to Lotus for a short stint as number-two to Mitch Kapor, and then became CEO of Symantec Corporation, leading the development of its first product and turning it into the security leader it is today. He left to work as president of the Paul Allen Group with Microsoft founder Paul Allen.
But he couldn't resist the siren call of his background, as the son of Lou Raburn, a longtime engineer at Douglas Aircraft and McDonnell-Douglas Corporation. In 1998, with funding from his longtime friend Bill Gates, he started Eclipse Aviation. Eclipse is a different animal from the PC start-ups Raburn was familiar with: It has already raised and used most of more than $1 billion in capital. But as he did in the software business, Raburn is building Eclipse for scale, using upfront investments in automation, processes and design that will lower incremental costs at scale.
In 2000, he gave a talk at PC Forum to an audience including many of the PC world's leaders, laying out how software optimization technology could combine with very-light jets to create a new air-taxi market, an idea later picked up by Jim Fallows in his book Free Flight.
Currently, Eclipse is the hottest news in the airplane world, even though it has not yet reached that level of scale. It has received type certification for the Eclipse 500 and 135 operations and a production certificate from the FAA, though it still lacks a working FMS as of early March. The company is currently delivering aircraft steadily and has a multi-year backlog of Eclipse 500s. It sees huge opportunities outside the U.S., and has recently entered a joint venture to produce aircraft in Russia.
Since Raburn first learned to fly as a teenager on a Cessna 150, he has accumulated more than 6500 hours of flight time and has earned his multi-engine, instrument, commercial and rotary ratings. He holds type ratings in more than 16 aircraft types ranging from WWII bombers to piston airliners to modern corporate jets, including the Eclipse 500. Raburn is on the board of directors of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) and the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA). He also serves on the Executive Council to the FAA's Research, Engineering and Development Advisory Committee (REDAC). And he will leave Flight School early, piloting his own Eclipse to Boston, to pick up the prestigious Godfrey Cabot Award for 2008.
