Emivest SJ30 set to fly by May

This aircraft will be the first of five or six that the manufacturer intends to build and deliver this year at its San Antonio, Texas, USA manufacturing facility.  The new investors are determined to overcome the plague of problems that has the seen the SJ30 fall short since the type was certificated back in 2005.

Funding issues as well as production tooling issues where wings were not coming out of jigs straight meant heavy delays and threatened to cripple the jet’s progress.

Since the FAA awarded the light jet its type certificate in 2005 the company had managed to build and deliver just two aircraft.  Of those two Emivest now owns one and is using it as a flight training and demonstrator aircraft at the manufacturing plant.

Emivest is now the majority shareholder when last year it acquired 80% of the share capital from Taiwanese investors

Apart from plans to restart deliveries Emivest has been working to optimise production of the jet with a goal to produce 45-50 aircraft a year by the end of 2010.  To coincide with its production optimisation the company will transfer fuselage, vertica tail and rudder production from the Martinsburg, West Virgina, USA site to another location, possibly San Antonio.

In return, Martinsburg, which employs 30% of Emivest's 300 US-based staff, will become a "centre of excellence" for wings and as such will also produce the wing control surfaces that are now built in San Antonio.

Emivest's first aircraft, serial number 8, will be delivered to a private company in southern California, the first of three jets it has ordered. Company pilots are receiving ground and flight training in San Antonio.

Emivest says the orderbook is steady at 250 orders for the $7.25 million jet, a backlog representing 24-30 months of production. Emivest initially priced the aircraft at $6.2 million last year, but included a built-in cost escalator based on the US consumer price index.