Yesterday's Denver Post has an article article noting a very sad development: Adam Aircraft has suspended operations and laid off 500 more workers. The Post article went into a lot more detail than Adam Aircraft's almost terse press release. This news comes less than a month after we reported that the company laid off 300 while working toward securing the funding it needed to continue operations.

I am amazed and disappointed that in this time nobody else has taken advantage of the opportunity to get in on such a promising venture. The Eclipse 500 is in production and selling well...there are even two air taxi companies with fleets based on it. Big names like Cessna, Piper, Diamond, Cirrus and others continue development of their own VLJs. Adam's A700 offers more cabin space than some of those with, similar performance and economy. Bizjournals.com reports that Adam's current backlog is over $1 Billion. Neither this company or this market look like losers to me.

This news also comes in close proximity to our report that ATG, developers of the Javelin VLJ, have essentially suspended operations as well.

Thankfully, neither ATG or Adam have given up. I sure hope some investors realize the potential of the VLJ market and choose to take advantage of that. We'll let you know if we hear anything.

Now, my question is: both ATG and Adam Aircraft are Denver based companies. What makes them so different from other VLJ developers? Why are they struggling when others are doing just fine. You could say that they are upstarts while Cessna and others are already established in the aircraft market, except Eclipse is an upstart too. Why are these two companies stumbling and how can they get back on their feet?