It looks to be a big month for very light jets (VLJ), with the impending FAA certification of the Eclipse 500. The low-cost six-seater retails for $1.3 million, and has attracted a massive waiting list. Among its customers are DayJet, a bold regional “air-taxi” service based in Florida, and a few fractional plays, including Jet Alliance, OurPlane, and Easy AirShare. We’ll highlight these companies over time as they emerge.

There are several noteworthy aspects about the surge of VLJs. Most prominently, both Eclipse and DayJet are the endeavors of successful tech executives from the software trenches. Vern Raburn and Ed Iacobucci have resumes more at home in Silicon Valley than on an airstrip. But like the founders of NetJets and Marquis Jet, their status as outsiders may have been a vital asset in pioneering a new modus operandi in private aviation.

Each revisited the traditional assumptions, reacting to shifts in behavior, wealth, capital and technology. By reframing the market, they created a new set of challenges.

Some of these were purely mathematical, such as DayJets’ complex scheduling system, which optimizes operations based on real-time customer requests, aircraft positioning, crew availability, weather conditions and air-traffic patterns … all at three seats at a time. Another example is the composition of NetJets’ fleet, which guarantees availability of each client “owned” plane, despite the fact that there may be 16 such owners per plane. See our upcoming Decision Guide to Private Jet Travel for more information on how this works.

Some innovations are marketing and packaging, namely Marquis Jet’s dogged initiative and persistence in landing the NetJets partnership and defining the prepaid card market. Their argument for this new model – offering non-owner access to NetJets’ fleet and operations – was considered both bold and risky at the time. It’s a credit to them and NetJets that this now wildly successful format ever saw the light of day.

For Eclipse, the challenges were based in engineering, but as a nimble entrepreneur with fund-raising ability, Raburn bet he could outmaneuver the established players. The customer enthusiasm we’ve seen indicates that all four have re-established the strength of the entrepreneur in such a capital-intensive field.