Twenty years ago this month—1998—was a seminal year for world’s biggest airshow: It officially became AirVenture, displacing the old name, the EAA Fly-in and Convention. (Locals still call it EAA.) That year also marked the beginning of a new trend: The avionics revolution with color GPS mapcomms were afield and various PR machines were making noise about super cheap light jets.
Garmin’s groundbreaking GNS430 color mapcomm appeared at AirVenture for the first time and people lined up to see it. Trimble was a player—remember them?—and coupled up with another company, Avidyne, they were making a bid to sell full-stack avionics. It failed to launch, at least convincingly, although Mooney picked Trimble as a sole avionics supplier. We saw a small cloud of computer-based moving map programs that, by today’s standards, were on the clunky side, but dazzled the crowd two decades ago.
Diamond was still selling its two-place Katana and although the four-place DA40 had surfaced in Europe, it was a no-show at Oshkosh. Whiffs of diesel were in the air, as Lycoming announced a development project with Detroit Diesel. It fizzled, and so did Continental’s follow-up on the AGATE diesel developed with NASA seed money. It flew, but never potentiated.
In a partnership with Unison, Lycoming also announced a single-lever electronic engine control system called EPIC. It too was abandoned for lack of market interest. Continental Motors already had its FADEC flying, which evolved into the PowerLink system. Pilots liked looking at it, but not buying it. The system never achieved significant market penetration.
There were light jet announcements in 1997, but the hype machine got into high gear the following year. The decade of the oughts was to be the era of the $300,000 personal jet, said famed designer Burt Rutan. VisionAire announced its Vantage, which it claimed would cruise at 300 knots and sell for $400,000 to $500,000 in a two-place version, $700,000 for a four-seater. The company was confidently engaging in that time-honored GA tradition of selling positions. We dutifully wrote it all down with the hope of revisiting it in the future and herewith, the time capsule is opening.
