So you want to be a top gun? Owning a Javelin is the answer to your dreams.

At age 16 I drove a dirt-colored Honda Accord with rattling speakers and iffy brakes. My friend Si drove a Pontiac Catalina Safari wagon with a wood-paneled exterior and a loose, billowing headliner. Chris’s car was a Plymouth K-Car that went 0 to 60 in, well, never, unless he pointed it downhill. Cast-off family cars each, but to us they represented independence and freedom, and inspired parking-lot pride each morning at school--pride that lasted until the moment Tee Clarkson arrived in his black Saab 900 with leather interior, turbocharged engine and pounding stereo system. Tee had money, yes, but also something else. Flash. Swagger. Pluck enough to pull into school in a car that made the rest of the lot irrelevant.

I recalled Tee Clarkson’s Saab on a recent visit to Aviation Technology Group (ATG) at Denver’s Centennial Airport. I’d gone there to see the Javelin, its two-seater military-style twin-engine civilian jet. A Ferrari for the skies, I’d been told, a pocket-size F/A-18 to scratch the Chuck Yeager itch in weekend pilots the world over. Price: $2.8 million. After four years of design and development, ATG began building a prototype in early 2004, and a test pilot flew the Javelin for the first time last September. By my visit, ATG had deposits on 103 planes, had conducted two more test flights (they’d flown five by press time) and were projecting the first FAA-approved Javelins to be delivered to customers in 2008.

In full sun on the runway at Centennial, surrounded by multimillion-dollar business jets, the Javelin stopped me cold: Tee Clarkson, I thought, patting the fuselage like it was mine, get a load of this.

Civil aviation needs a sports car. Such was the thinking of George Bye on retiring from the Air Force after Desert Storm. Bye missed flying jets; the typical private airfield seemed “a parking lot full of vans and sedans.” With his training as an engineer and his understanding of the latest engine and navigational technology, Bye went to work on plans for a plane with sexy lines and all the flight capabilities of the fighters and trainers he’d known in the Air Force. He founded ATG in 1998 to bring his vision to life. “I knew guys like myself,” he told me, “ex-military guys--there’s thousands and thousands of us--who flew jets in the military and would love to have an alternative aircraft. If it appealed to me, it would appeal to others.”

That customer base would demand good looks, but also performance. Hence the Javelin would be lightweight and have plenty of power: two 1,800-pound-thrust Williams International jet engines. It would climb 10,000 feet per minute and top out at Mach 0.9. A trim wingspan (23.25 feet) would make the Javelin agile and acrobatic, capable of pulling up to six g’s on high-speed turns, rolls and loops. It would be fun to fly, and somewhat practical, with a judicious amount of cargo space. “If you can’t carry your golf clubs in it,” Bye said, “it’s almost like, who cares?”

As a business venture, the Javelin would have the marketplace practically to itself. “It has twice the thrust-to-weight ratio of the typical business jet,” Bye said. “You can do things with this airplane you couldn’t even imagine doing in a Gulfstream or Cessna Citation or Learjet.” Bye’s closest realistic competition comes from a Cold War–era Czechoslovakian trainer, the Aero Vodochody L-39 Albatros. The Czechs built enough of these that a few hundred have found their way into civilian hands. The L-39 has the reputation of a fast, reliable military jet (and is a relative steal from warbird dealers at a ballpark price of $300,000), but it’s a gas-guzzler by comparison, twice as heavy as the Javelin, and with shorter range. And unless you read Cyrillic, you’ll have to translate the instruments.