On the Record with
DR. SAM WILLIAMS, CHAIRMAN AND CEO,
WILLIAMS INTERNATIONAL

Williams Again Breaks Small-Jet Ground

Sam Williams is a wizard at bringing military capabilities to business jets.

If there is one individual today who may leave as great a legacy to private and corporate aviation as Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech and William T. Piper, it is Dr Sam Williams.

Eclipse Aviation president Vern Raburn compares the Eclipse 500 Jet to the personal computer: a new technology so radical that it will change its industry beyond recognition. And, says Raburn, the equivalent of the microprocessor in the Eclipse is Dr. Williams' EJ22 engine: a 770 pounds thrust engine, weighing a mere 85 pounds (that's a thrust-to-weight ratio equivalent to today's best fighter engines), with a 4:1 bypass ratio for low noise and good fuel economy.

Add to this an engine price that supports the $870,000 Eclipse tag, and you have a product that, if it works, will hit the Bonanza-to-Meridian sector like a rogue asteroid.

"It's been a great year," says the chairman and CEO of Williams International. Four prototypes of the FJX-2, the NASA-supported predecessor of the EJ22 engine in the Eclipse and the similar, but not identical engine that Williams will sell to others, have run successfully for 100 hours, including altitude testing at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, OH. "It's progressing very well, and we have a very high confidence level in our costs," says Dr. Williams.

Williams International's relationship with Eclipse, says Dr. Williams, started almost three years before the public announcement in April. At the 1997 Experimental Aircraft Association convention at Oshkosh, WI, Williams showed its Rutan-built V-Jet II twin-jet technology demonstrator aircraft. "We are not an aircraft manufacturer," says Dr. Williams. "We built the aircraft to stimulate interest on the part of the airplane manufacturers in developing a small twin-jet aircraft in the 4,000 pounds category." One of the people who saw the airplane was Raburn. "What we anticipated that the V-Jet II would accomplish in several years, it accomplished in a matter of months."

Williams' EJ-22 is making possible even smaller jets than the FJ44.

Very soon after the 1997 Oshkosh show, without a word in public, Raburn assembled the necessary finance to launch development of a certificated engine based on the FJX-2. "We wanted to help Eclipse get started, so we agreed to help them in certification," says Dr. Williams. "We had experience in certificating engines, so we were in a position to be of great assistance with program management and systems management."

The Williams and Eclipse companies are separate, Dr. Williams stresses. Asked whether other customers take second place to Eclipse, Williams says he has "no concerns whatsoever." Not only is the Eclipse design team physically and organizationally isolated at Williams' Walled Lake, MI, headquarters-"Our culture has grown on a confidential basis, and the Eclipse team learns nothing about what other aircraft companies are doing"-but the Eclipse program's money has advanced the development of the engine by more than two years, for all customers. "We'll be ready when the other airplane companies conclude that they want to build small airplanes," says Williams.

While Dr. Williams gives NASA a great deal of credit for sponsoring the development of new engines and avionics, he stresses that the money that Eclipse's backers have committed is several times NASA's investment. Without it, a production engine would emerge more slowly.

The new engine is "evolutionary, not revolutionary", says Dr. Williams. "We delivered 6,000 turbofan engines in this thrust class. Our manufacturing processes are similar to those we use on other engines, but refined. The aerodynamic advances are important, but not revolutionary, but the total engine is another step down the road from what we have already seen."

Williams International has been pushing the cause of the small jet aircraft for decades, ever since Minneapolis entrepreneur Tony Fox designed the Foxjet around two Williams cruise-missile engines. Today, says Dr. Williams, it is "steadily advancing technology in manufacture and design." that makes the new jets feasible. "The other thing that helps us," he says, "is that the piston-powered light aircraft are getting awfully old."

Are there new engines in the company's future? "We're very interested in bigger aircraft," says Dr. Williams, "but we're not announcing anything until we really have something." As for smaller aircraft, Dr. Williams predicts that an FJ22-type engine will eventually fly in a two- to four-seat single.