Industry News

Lately, good news in the world of general aviation has been scarce, but heres some: The aviation financial markets are so liquid as to have been left intact by the subprime lending crisis that has tanked the housing industry. Further, the aircraft loan business remains competitive enough to offer various loan products at reasonable interest rates. Nonetheless, the savvy buyer can make the loan process more painless by doing some prep work before picking up the phone or surfing the Web for money sources. As with a house purchase, both the buyer and the object of his financial affections must pass certain tests-not the least of which is a competent pre-buy on the airplane, having your financial house in order with the documents to prove it and knowing about any credit surprises before the bank finds them.

Surrendering your airplane to the shop for maintenance work requires a certain stoicism. You have to steel yourself to expect the worst and enjoy the relief when the news isn’t so bad after all. Then there’s the invoice, which is always higher than you figured. Sometimes a lot higher. Why is that? Cant a shop provide an accurate estimate and stick to it? Why must opening the invoice envelope be an agita-inducing moment? There’s no easy answer to this, other than to say thats the nature of airplane ownership-get used to it. But there’s a limit to how much over the estimate an invoice can or should go before something has to give-either the shop gives you a break or, better, you knew the invoice was spiraling upward before the envelope ever arrived.

Let me make you president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for a moment and place you in Cessnas boardroom at the opposite end of a 60-foot mahogany conference table from Jack Pelton. Youve just heard a team of MBAs explain how manufacturing the new Skycatcher LSA in China will reduce the cost of goods by $70,000. Your job is to convince Cessna that its wrong to ship the work to China. Heres the PowerPoint mouse, whats your pitch? (Send me an e-mail with the high points covered.) Acknowledging as how that $70,000 figure may be a plant for gullible reporters, only the equally gullible would believe that a U.S. factory could somehow match the China numbers. If we were talking about machine parts or plastics or some other segment where highly productive automation can beat Chinese cheap labor in productivity and quality, youve got a shot. But metal airplanes are still built with ballpeen hammers, Clecos and tin shears-lots of hand operations, not much CAM. You could play the emotional, patriotic card, but that wont fly against the MBAs remorseless spreadsheet.

In the world of light airplane manufacturing, Cessna has figured out one thing better than any other single manufacturer: There’s a difference between people who talk about buying airplanes and people who actually buy them. The people who talk gave up the Cessna Skyhawk for dead when it was reintroduced in 1997; the people who buy made it the second best-selling single in 2006 behind the Cirrus SR22. It will occupy the same position when the 2007 sales figures are tallied. Not bad for an airframe conceived in 1956 and still selling against the cutting-edge best from Cirrus, Diamond and others. Incredibly, Cessna isn’t done with the Skyhawk yet, having announced a Thielert-powered diesel version last fall at AOPA Expo in Hartford and, as of press time, it has dropped the 160-HP R-model from the lineup. Given Cessnas confidence in the 172, we wondered how the four variants of the Skyhawk-two versions of the 180-HP gas model and two versions of the new diesel-stack up against each other and against an older Hawk.

In his editorial in the January 2008 issue, Paul Bertorelli asks us to look at 100LL “rationally” and then follows with “avgas represents such a tiny slice of the worlds refined fuel supplies that the volume of lead is miniscule.” I suggest that it is therefore irrational for anybody to spend as much as a femtosecond worrying about the environmental effects of the tetraethyl lead from 100LL. So right off the bat, were trying to please irrational people. I further suggest that these same irrational people will not be appeased by a switch from low lead to no lead, because of the man-made global warming implications of using any carbon-based fuel. The miniscule amount of CO2 produced by general aviation piston aircraft is no more a man-made global warming hazard than the lead from 100LL, but weve already conceded that none of the debate is rational in the first place, right?

If there’s anything good about disputes between owners and aircraft maintenance shops, its that they don’t happen very often. Unfortunately, if a big upgrade job does go sour, there may be no ready recourse for owners. Legal action is expensive and likely to be unsatisfying and in the end, its better to avoid the dispute in the first place. In other words, pick the right shop at the outset and you wont need to hone your commercial combat skills.Thats the assessment we draw from the experience of two owners who recently contacted us concerning aircraft upgrade projects that took vastly longer than the shop promised and left one owner out a couple of thousand dollars in missing materials and another fuming over both the delay and poor quality.

Five years ago, when we began covering the emergence of diesel engines for aircraft, I thought we were certainly looking at the next big thing. I still think that, but the latest bright shiny object has lost some of its luster. Beginning on page 4 of this issue is an in-depth report on ownership experiences with aircraft diesels and the news is hardly joyful. I used the word “tarnished” in this report and I chose it carefully. Bottom line: After three years in the field in meaningful numbers, owners are pleased with the performance and economy of the market-leading Thielert diesels, but they are clearly unhappy with what many describe as poor reliability, high maintenance costs and, most troubling, weak factory support from Thielert. Make no mistake-the market forces favoring diesel are all but overwhelming. Avgas is scarce in parts of the world and expensive everywhere. Cost-sensitive owners are thus spring-loaded to at least consider, if not enthusiastically support, more efficient powerplants. Some want economy for economys sake. Even so, the entire diesel idea could still tank and take a portion of the GA market with it.

When Diamond pulled the wraps off its proposed DA42 Twin Star at the Berlin Airshow in May 2002, we thought theyd lost touch with reality. A new twin in the current market? And powered by automotive-influenced diesel engines just then at the prototype stage? Surely they were joking.No, they werent. And 350 Twin Stars later, the jokes on us. The Twin Star has been a smash hit, especially in Europe and Australasia, where avgas is $8 a gallon, if you can find it at all. But there’s some tarnish on this bright success story. The Thielert Centurion 1.7 engines that power the Twin Star have accumulated what many owners consider to be a poor service history, with numerous premature replacements, cylinder head cracking and at least 22 inflight stoppages that Thielert confirms.

Now that Cessna has announced that it too will offer the Thielert diesel in the ever-popular Skyhawk, were moved to wonder if Diamond was too early and Cessnas late to the game. We may never know, but Cessna clearly has one advantage: The diesel Skyhawk will have the new-and-improved Centurion 2.0, not the first-gen 1.7. If the 2.0 corrects the 1.7s nagging maintenance issues, the Skyhawk may be positioned to (again) become an airplane for the global market.

Owning an airplane isn’t what it used to be. Or should we say, operating one isn’t. Given the cost of avgas, sole ownership looks less appealing than it once did and multiple-owner partnerships and fractionals look more attractive than ever. So do flying clubs, which split ownership among many and further reduce individual costs.But the problem with flying clubs is similar to renting. The airplanes probably arent the newest and pilots who own a tenth or a twentieth of an airplane arent likely to have much pride of ownership and the clubs airplanes may reflect that. But what about combining the fractional idea with the economics of a club? Thats the idea behind iFly, which launched a little over a year ago. iFly is basically an exclusive flying club that asks what fractionals ask: What if you could have all the benefits of ownership, but none of the hassles?

Im a little late responding to the top 10 safety investments article (see July 2007 Aviation Consumer), but I was surprised at the omission of autopilots. How many of all the judgment-type accidents might have been avoided if pilot workload were reduced by an autopilot to let the pilot actually check the weather, be less fatigued, understand the maps or maintain flight in IMC? The most important criteria-which is impossible to determine-is how many accidents have been avoided because of a safety investment. I think autopilots would rank very high on that list, even though the Nall Report will never cite “failure to have or use autopilot” as the cause of an accident.

Cessnas announcement in September that it was seeking to buy Columbia had a bit of the sneaky Pete to it. Whether intended or not, the buyout offer got the harder play in breaking news stories, not the fact that Columbia was declaring bankruptcy. Stories in the aviation press seemed to assume that readers and reporters already knew about the bankruptcy and that the Cessna tender was the real news. Yet the two developments occurred almost simultaneously. Interesting timing.