Forget rail strikes and traffic jams, hail a 'sky taxi' - the car-sized jet plane

If Vern Raburn has anything to do with it, the next revolution in air travel will be just around the corner.

Out will go the conventions of long queues at airports, of pernickety security checks and unexpected delays on the tarmac. In their place will come the air taxi – a service catering to small handfuls of businessmen, ready to pick them up at a local airstrip and able to ferry them where they are going, hassle-free, for little more than the price of a regular economy-fare commercial ticket.

Mr Raburn's brainchild is a twin-engine jet developed by his New Mexico-based company, Eclipse Aviation, and unveiled to the public for the first time last weekend. What is special about the Eclipse 500, as the plane is called, is that it is expected to cost a fraction of private jets and could attain fuel efficiency levels closer to a Jeep or Land Rover than a standard aircraft.

That, in turn, means the private jet could soon become a reality, not just for the rich and pampered but for any group of travellers – most likely business travellers who need to make commuter hops of up to 1,500 miles. Mr Raburn envisages thousands of them criss-crossing the United States and Europe.

The technological key to the Eclipse is the twin turbofan engine and construction innovations that promise a price tag of around $850,000 (£500,000) – a snip compared with $4m for the most basic executive jet.

"This is going to force a whole new way of thinking in aviation," says Hilmar Hilmarsson, chief executive of a Swiss jet club called Aviace AG that has already pre-ordered more than 100 Eclipse 500s.

And he is not the only one to get excited: aviation specialists, business analysts and New Mexico politicians have all marvelled at the speed with which Mr Raburn has taken the plane from a concept just two years ago to a functioning prototype.

He has a team of 180 engineers ready to go into full-scale production and investors queueing around the block. The aim is to sell as many as 1,000 Eclipse 500s a year.

There is still a long way to go, not least because the plane has yet to be taken on a test flight. But Mr Raburn believes the Eclipse could be operational as early as mid-2004. Mr Hilmarsson, for example, is already setting up partnerships in numerous European countries, including Britain.

There are, of course, some sceptics. Breakthroughs in aviation are notoriously quick to come and go and claims of revolutions in transport often prove to be hollow.

Long before the Eclipse venture, a research scientist in California called Paul Moller began work on what he calls the SkyCar – a vertical take-off vehicle that could end up parked outside every middle-class home in the Western world and would not require the services of an airfield. The SkyCar recently completed a successful test flight. Mr Moller's company, Moller International, is about to be floated publicly.

At the other end of the technological spectrum, the much touted Segway – a new scooter dreamed up by the inventor Dean Kamen – is soon to go into mass production and is already being test-driven by postmen on the hills of San Francisco.