Cessna/Textron commitment to small GA.

denverpilot said:
Skycatcher was crap canned as soon as they couldn’t find a fleet buyer for it. Literally crap canned, they tossed the remaining ones in a dumpster.
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I heard that the last batch from the Chinese builder had so many manufacturing defects as to make it infeasible to make them airworthy. However, I wouldn't be surprised if lack of demand were a big part of it too, given how expensive they were.
 
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Palmpilot said:
I heard that the last batch from the Chinese builder had so many manufacturing defects as to make it infeasible to make them airworthy. However, I wouldn't be surprised if lack of demand weren't a big part of it too, given how expensive they were.
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Probably true. Poor airplane never stood a chance.
 
denverpilot said:
Skycatcher was crap canned as soon as they couldn’t find a fleet buyer for it. Literally crap canned, they tossed the remaining ones in a dumpster.

As far as the lawsuit goes, file bankruptcy, start new business name DBA New and Improved Cessna, and continue on, just like all slimy American companies do these days. Works for everyone else. :)

Cessna is making a LOT more than $50K profit on the 182s they’re selling to CAP.

They are a fleet sales company now. That’s just what they want to be. That’s fine, but they’re not selling much to individuals. Cirrus has that bottled up for the most part.
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Altruism in business is overrated.
If fleet sales are where the money is to be made then it should be no surprise fleet sales is where Cessna and Piper are selling.

Cirrus (and Mooney, ICON and few others) sell playthings to rich kids. That's a seriously limited market. Selling to individuals is so limited that, with its current product line, Cirrus is a slow growth cottage industry company, at best. It better hope the next recession doesn't cut its sales in half again, like the last one did.

Why should Textron have any interest in that market? The arguments on this thread about what it really costs Textron to build, market and support an airplane are amusing. It's ironic that at the same time there are posts advocating that Cessna boost sales by cutting prices, the maker of the most expensive new single piston aircraft is lauded as such a success story. Even if it cut the price of a 182 in half it won't move the needle on individual sales. Seriously, how many more people on this Board would decide to shell out for a new 182 in the next year if Cessna did a half-price sale?

I took my first ever drive across Kansas last year, on my way from Cheyenne to Tulsa. It was real eye opener, and not just because of the lush crops of wind turbines. Unlike where I live, every little hamlet has an airport with well marked access from the highway. That trip is when it really struck me as to why places like Wichita and Tulsa have such a light plane legacy, developed at a time when the manufacturing heartland was in New England and the Great Lakes region. From the '20s through to the early '60s travelling between the communities all over the Plains must have been a *****. Vast distances, lousy dirt roads, not so reliable cars. Little airplanes flying off grass must have been a very attractive alternative.

But the world has changed, and we aren't going back. Interstate highways, low cost commuter airlines, declining rural populations as agriculture employs a tiny fraction and all the kids moved to the cities. Outside of flight training, who buys a single engine piston airplane these days to undertake any sort of commerce? Are rural doctors using their SR-22s to make house calls (and occasionally to kill themselves) the way they used their Bonanzas in the '50s? Somehow I doubt it. I use my twin to do some business related travel to out of the way locations to save time, but now that the price of oil & avgas is climbing again even I am doing less of that, and using the regionals (which I despise) more. Its purely practical economics.

What's the main driver for individuals to own airplanes? Mostly recreational and personal convenience I would venture. And those purposes are purely discretionary spending. So we spend what we can afford, for as long as we think we can afford it. And for a great many of us even a $150,000 new airplane is out of reach financially.
 
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Another point -- the manufacturers aren't inclined to compete with their 1978 selves. You want to buy a 2018 172S for around $400 large, when you can get a pick-of-the-crop, updated '78 172N with 180 hp for less than a fifth of that? The market was saturated by around 1980 or so; if there weren't enough used ones to go around, the used-market prices would be higher.

You can't find a '78 Cirrus, or Ovation, or ICON, or Carbon Cub; thus the new ones are selling.

That's another way the airplane market and car market are different. A '78 Chevy Malibu, no matter how nice, is not competition for a 2018 model.
 
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Pilawt said:
Another point -- the manufacturers aren't inclined to compete with their 1978 selves.
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Cessna and Piper seem quite content making their 1978 products and competing with each other for those flight school contracts, actually.

With removal of the TTx from the product lineup, which they didn’t even really create, Cessna threw in the towel to Cirrus on anything new.
 
GRG55 said:
If automotive engines were such a great idea for airplanes, it would have happened a LONG time ago. It hasn't. And it won't. Even in the E-AB world it hasn't caught on. Wonder why? They don't work well. And it's not because there hasn't been a ton of money spent trying.
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Tech improves all the time. Regulations change, too. Volvo can get 181 HP per liter from a production engine. I just bring it because an order of magnitude cheaper engine running on widely available fuel would change the rules. And that's the kind of R&Da company committed to GA would be doing.
 
denverpilot said:
They’re not cheap but heck, if you want to go as slow as a 182 with similar load capability you can get the Tecnam twin and burn LESS fuel running TWO engines as a T182T.
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Wow. Those are neat.
 
trenton said:
Tech improves all the time. Regulations change, too. Volvo can get 181 HP per liter from a production engine. I just bring it because an order of magnitude cheaper engine running on widely available fuel would change the rules. And that's the kind of R&Da company committed to GA would be doing.
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Well then maybe you should be trying to convince Volvo to commit itself to GA. ;)
 
trenton said:
Tech improves all the time. Regulations change, too. Volvo can get 181 HP per liter from a production engine. I just bring it because an order of magnitude cheaper engine running on widely available fuel would change the rules. And that's the kind of R&Da company committed to GA would be doing.
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And it's never as easy as the novice thinks it is. Cooling for high-output powerplants is dificult in the airframe, much harder than in a car or boat. Homebuilders have been fooling with conversions since the 1930s, better than 80 years, and all of them have found that things like torsional vibration (a phenomenon that must be dealt with in any RPM reduction system), weight,reliability, cost, and a lot of other stuff, all conspire to make it difficult and expensive. Auto manufacturers have teams of engineers to deal with torsional vibration alone. It takes a lot of engines to pay for that sort of thing.

A reduction system, whether it uses gears, belts, whatever--is necessary to use a tiny one-litre engine to drive a propeller. It cannot be direct-drive, since the propeller has so many limitations. I have experience with a 2.2L Subaru driving a prop through a reduction, and believe me, it gave troubles. There were RPM bands it did not like, and the physics to explain that are well-known to anyone who has studied the subject. Many redrives have eaten themselves alive, by blowing up, and sometimes airplanes have crashed. Geared certified aircraft engines have various issues and a lot of people avoid them. Some WWII airplanes used geared engines, but the TBO was not expected to be anywhere near even 1000 hours. That's not acceptable in GA. The certified Thielert Diesel used in some airplanes, both as OEM and as an STC, had a 600-hour redrive replacement TBR. I think it started as a 300-hour item. Big attraction, that.
 
Rotax 9xx series is geared , partially water cooled - with 50 000 engines out there , 2000 TBO and great reliability ... so it can be done right.
 
Dan Thomas said:
And it's never as easy as the novice thinks it is. Cooling for high-output powerplants is dificult in the airframe, much harder than in a car or boat. Homebuilders have been fooling with conversions since the 1930s, better than 80 years, and all of them have found that things like torsional vibration (a phenomenon that must be dealt with in any RPM reduction system), weight,reliability, cost, and a lot of other stuff, all conspire to make it difficult and expensive. Auto manufacturers have teams of engineers to deal with torsional vibration alone. It takes a lot of engines to pay for that sort of thing.

A reduction system, whether it uses gears, belts, whatever--is necessary to use a tiny one-litre engine to drive a propeller. It cannot be direct-drive, since the propeller has so many limitations. I have experience with a 2.2L Subaru driving a prop through a reduction, and believe me, it gave troubles. There were RPM bands it did not like, and the physics to explain that are well-known to anyone who has studied the subject. Many redrives have eaten themselves alive, by blowing up, and sometimes airplanes have crashed. Geared certified aircraft engines have various issues and a lot of people avoid them. Some WWII airplanes used geared engines, but the TBO was not expected to be anywhere near even 1000 hours. That's not acceptable in GA. The certified Thielert Diesel used in some airplanes, both as OEM and as an STC, had a 600-hour redrive replacement TBR. I think it started as a 300-hour item. Big attraction, that.
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All excellent points. I wonder though, isn't the point of auto conversions that the engine cost delta makes it so as to be taken as throwaways though? I know I know, maybe in EAB land, not certified land for sure.
 
Dan Thomas said:
And it's never as easy as the novice thinks it is. Cooling for high-output powerplants is dificult in the airframe, much harder than in a car or boat. Homebuilders have been fooling with conversions since the 1930s, better than 80 years, and all of them have found that things like torsional vibration (a phenomenon that must be dealt with in any RPM reduction system), weight,reliability, cost, and a lot of other stuff, all conspire to make it difficult and expensive. Auto manufacturers have teams of engineers to deal with torsional vibration alone. It takes a lot of engines to pay for that sort of thing...
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Some people have no clue what it actually takes to stay in business in aviation. Or how difficult it is.

Last year Volvo sold 571,577 cars. GA manufacturers collectively sold 1185 piston powered airplanes last year. That's about 0.2% of Volvo's sales.

Good luck funding R&D on that sales volume. Even much lauded Cirrus, with one-third of those GA piston sales is using Continentals and Lycomings. Can't imagine why. :rolleyes:
 
Warmi said:
Rotax 9xx series is geared , partially water cooled - with 50 000 engines out there , 2000 TBO and great reliability ... so it can be done right.
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Rotax isn't exclusively an aircraft engine manufacturer and doesn't fund its R&D effort on aircraft derivative engine sales only.
 
No, they make about 200 000 various engines every year ... aviation engines are less then 10% of that and from what I hear, are often used as a marketing tool for other lines of engines ( the reliability angle)
Anyway, that’s one way to sustain a relatively small aviation engine market ..
 
hindsight2020 said:
All excellent points. I wonder though, isn't the point of auto conversions that the engine cost delta makes it so as to be taken as throwaways though? I know I know, maybe in EAB land, not certified land for sure.
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Even in E-AB land it doesn't work. Walk around the Experimental parking at Oshkosh. The number of E-ABs with automotive conversions is a miniscule fraction of the total.

They aren't easy to build, they aren't cheap and most of them aren't that reliable.
 
Warmi said:
No, they make about 200 000 various engines every year ... aviation engines are less then 10% of that and from what I hear, are often used as a marketing tool for other lines of engines ( the reliability angle)
Anyway, that’s one way to sustain a relatively small aviation engine market ..
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Even that doesn't always work well. Porsche developed an aircraft engine derivative from it's 911 powerplant. I doubt anybody will accuse Porsche of being anything but deadly serious when when it comes to R&D. Mooney sold a few planes powered with that engine. But it was a flop. And that was at a time when piston GA annual sales were much greater than they are now.

DSC06238.jpg
 
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GRG55 said:
Seriously, how many more people on this Board would decide to shell out for a new 182 in the next year if Cessna did a half-price sale?
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Probably nobody, there's no reason to buy a new 172 / 182 when the used market is so healthy. It's like if automotive advancement stopped in 1978 yet the same '79 Dodge Dart being sold today in 2018 was 10X the cost. Nobody would buy new

Will be interesting to see where Cirrus is in 20 years.. they've kept advancing through g1, g2, etc., to keep buyers hungry

I still think throwing the TTx in the trash and letting the Bonanza starve to death are indications though that the passion for GA is gone. Companies aren't altruistic, sure, but you see when they have a passion for their industry. How many Steinways are sold in a year? Surely Steinway could abandon wooden pianos and just focus entirely on synthesizers, electric guitars, etc and make more money

It's a shame
 
The latest CD155 (Continental name for the Thielrt 2.0 engine) is up to 1200 hours on the gearbox and clutch. That is basically the engine half life. So not bad.
Diamond Austro engines you replace the torsion disk at TBO.

Both started lower and have increased the time as they learn, gather data and make incremental improvements. This is the only way it will happen in GA. Doing the detailed engine design and testing to get FAA sign off for a 2000 TBO out of the gate is cost prohibitive.

Tim

Sent from my LG-TP260 using Tapatalk
 
Tantalum said:
Probably nobody, there's no reason to buy a new 172 / 182 when the used market is so healthy. It's like if automotive advancement stopped in 1978 yet the same '79 Dodge Dart being sold today in 2018 was 10X the cost. Nobody would buy new

Will be interesting to see where Cirrus is in 20 years.. they've kept advancing through g1, g2, etc., to keep buyers hungry

I still think throwing the TTx in the trash and letting the Bonanza starve to death are indications though that the passion for GA is gone. Companies aren't altruistic, sure, but you see when they have a passion for their industry. How many Steinways are sold in a year? Surely Steinway could abandon wooden pianos and just focus entirely on synthesizers, electric guitars, etc and make more money

It's a shame
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The passion that is gone is that of pilots and owners. It shows in the steady decline in the non-professional pilot population, and the fact so many of us left are grey hairs. There is virtually no market for new certified piston powered airplanes. Period.

And companies that don't face up to that fact are doomed. It's not a matter of adapting to new buyer preferences or doing continuous improvement. It's the fact the entire certified piston aircraft market worldwide is barely over a 1000 units per year. And it should not have escaped everyone's attention that the Cirrus G6 "improvements" are now reduced to fancy new lights and shzt like that.

You are absolutely correct, it is a shame what has become of this industry in 40 years.
 
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Being a habitual contrarian, I would argue the aviation companies that are thriving today, including Textron/Cessna, have the strongest commitment to General Aviation. They have to or they stand little chance of surviving.

Maybe we need to revisit what is GA?

Wikipedia:
"General aviation (GA) is all civil aviation operations other than scheduled air services and non-scheduled air transport operations for remuneration or hire. General aviation flights range from gliders and powered parachutes to corporate business jet flights."​

AOPA has a narrower definition:
"General aviation is all civilian flying except scheduled passenger airline service."​

To its credit Textron/Cessna figured out where the GA market was headed before anyone else. Excluding Beech numbers, it's the biggest GA manufacturer in the world, and the Citation jet family is no small contributor to that position.

Piper sort of figured it out, but didn't have the development capital to see things through. Nevertheless it makes the only pressurized piston aircraft out there now. Despite that sales are falling steadily, mirroring what is happening in the piston market as a whole. Piper also makes the most affordable personal kerosene burner too. Last year, at 47 units, the Meridian outsold the piston Malibu 5:1. Maybe that tells us something about where the GA market has been going?

Daher/Socata sold a total of 14 piston aircraft of 4 different models (TB-9, TB-10, TB-20 & TB-21) in 2004/05, the last two years of production. Today Daher produces the TBM and sold 57 of them last year alone. I would venture that if it had persisted with some sort of misguided "commitment to R&D a better piston airplane" it would today be in a race to extinction with Mooney.

DIamond is struggling with sales that are 29% of what it enjoyed ten years ago. And this is one of the innovating piston manufacturers.

Cirrus sales are exactly half of what they were a decade ago, and despite the hype about its continuous improvement culture its still flogging pretty well the exact same airframe it was 17 years ago (okay, let's be charitable and give them credit for the improved wing). CIrrus too has figured out if it is to have any future it cannot depend on new piston aircraft sales exclusively.

TECNAM might be the company to watch in the piston space. They produce the wide range of airplanes Cessna and Piper used to in the glory days, and some of them have a real Italian design flair. For a strut-braced high wing the P2010 sure looks like a sweet airplane:

P2010-5182.jpg
 
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@GRG55 yeah Tecnam is sweet. All of 0.0 hrs in one but they look like a proper modern light GA contender.
 
GRG55 said:
Being a habitual contrarian, I would argue the aviation companies that are thriving today, including Textron/Cessna, have the strongest commitment to General Aviation.
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Technically the thread title says “small GA”. Not bizjets.
 
Cessna doesn't owe us anything. Their management has one job, to pay dividends to stockholders. That requires profits. They aren't a charity. In theold days they had a market that consumed volume. Now the volume has dropped. Overhead still has to be fed. To do that prices go up. Its the nature of business. I appreciate that they hold on as well as they do. I still can buy parts for my 43 year old airplane, a model they haven't produced for 37 years. Maintaining the parts inventory isn't cheap. I wouldn't want to be in that business.
 
Funny to se that piece on the rocket engines. At the Mooney owners forum a representative of Mooney said that they had trouble starting back up after 2008, they had blueprints but didn't really know how to put the airplane together. They had to round up some of the old workers to show them how.

Numbers bandied with little dissent. 1200 hours to build a Cirrus SR22. 3000 hours to build a Skyhawk. 6000 for a Mooney.
 
I agree with the comments on Tecnam. I've been looking into their lineup, and they have some very impressive aircraft. Wish I could afford one.
 
NordicDave said:
The Tecnam P2010 is the gen 2 Cessna that Cessna should have produced. I72XP performance power plant with 182 size and speed for $400K.

Awesome idea making a composite airframe with aluminum wings. Great compromise in materials.
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Stoddard-Hamilton (the Glasair folks) did it a long time ago already with their Glastar. I installed a Subaru conversion in one and flew it. Not nearly as easy as it looks, even using a then-common redrive--the RAF gyroplane unit.

In the end, installing a Lycoming would have cost no more money. The cowl had to be modified for the conversion. An engine mount had to be designed and mocked up, then manufactured. Engine mounting points had to be designed and installed on the engine. A cooling system and induction and exhaust systems had to be designed and fabricated, and I went through seven iterations of exhaust mufflers. Cabin heat used coolant, so that had to be built.

Thene there are the RPMs. The engine redlined at 5600 and the redrive reduced that by 2.2:1. A ground-adjustable fixed-pitch prop was used, two different manufacturers to try to get that right. As with any fixed prop, cruising RPMs are going to be close to redline; a Lyc that redlines at 2700 will be cruised at 2500 or so. If you do that with a Subaru, the fuel burn and noise and wear rates go way up, and leaning just a hair too much burns those little exhaust valves real quick. The engine was designed to run with EFI and EI to protect all that delicate stuff, 40 pounds of computers and processors and sensors and harnesses, and manual leaning presents the real risk of engine damage. Lycoming uses massively heavy, sodium-cooled exhaust valves to prevent that.

I cruised at 4600 RPM or so, which lowered the prop RPM to a point that the airplane cruised at 105-110 MPH instead of the 125-130 that a Lyc of the same HP gave in other Glastars.

See? not so simple. Or cheaper. There have been numerous similar efforts that have culminated in the builder finally getting fed up and installing a Lyc or Continental.
 
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There is no reason why Cessna could not have designed and built the Tecnam P2010 as the 21st century Cessna. Cessna had the NGP project which was similar to the P2010 and killed it off when they bought Columbia.


The slippery airframe allows the P2010 to fly at 182 speeds and with 172 fuel burn. More ergonomic controls and seating with the pull out lower cushion as pictured above.
 
GRG55 said:
Diamond is struggling with sales that are 29% of what it enjoyed ten years ago. And this is one of the innovating piston manufacturers.
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Diamond sells fewer airframes, that much is true. However, the London Ontario factory is currently making high margin DA40 NGs and DA62s as fast as they can. They are basically booked to full capacity for the next two years so much so that they haven’t resumed building 100ll burning DA40s yet despite strong demand.
 
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Seems like the big names who make composite airframes, except Mooney, are booked out. Even Piper with their older designs are booked out of capacity.

Cessna is devoid of originality and finding a market niche. The Corvallis was a copy of the Cirrus concept. They seem incapable of bargaining hard and discount into volume like Piper to sell greater volumes of solid proven airframes.
 
Pascal Forget said:
Diamond sells fewer airframes, that much is true. However, the London Ontario factory is currently making high margin DA40 NGs and DA62s as fast as they can. They are basically booked to full capacity for the next two years so much so that they haven’t resumed building 100ll burning DA40s yet despite strong demand.
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Based on what was posted in a Diamond forum; Diamond ran out of G1000 units for the DA-40 XLT, so until the NXi upgrade is certified and completed, no DA-40 XLTs will be produced. The DA-40 NG with NXi was certified only recently, with the DA-40 XLT pending.
But yes, the majority of production capacity is booked for the next three years with multiple fleet deliveries. If you want to order an DA-40 NG, the waiting time is just a few months. There is a longer wait time on the DA-42 and DA-62.

Tim
 
This was an eye-opening thread. I don't think I ever appreciated how low demand has gone in GA. Hats off to @GRG55 - very compelling and well-thought points.

My POV: The irony is that if the manufacturers invested "properly" in R&D, they could do more to drive up demand by creating new and innovative features at reduced pricing. It won't happen if they don't compete and innovate. @GRG55 is 100% correct - it's not in the best interest of textron's shareholders for textron to grow single-piston demand by throwing money at single-piston R&D. Also, they have scale benefits by keeping the exact same design this many years. Maybe Cirrus will pull it off, not sure. My hope is that GA in 2028 will have relatively lower cost airplanes which are autonomous, alternative-fueled (or electric), and less costly to maintain (than today). Flying isn't going away. GA may change if demand continues to wane, but it won't disappear. Once someone creates an amazing enough airplane at the right price-point, then demand will boom. Most everyone wants to be able to fly.
 
Cessna/Textron is like General Motors of the 1980's.... A business run by spreadsheets and bean counters. What works for the ATV & snowmobile market should work for Aviation. Winning strategy.

Their competitors have manufacturing positions sold out for months. People have made money reselling their position closer in line for Cirrus products.
 
nj-pilot said:
Once someone creates an amazing enough airplane at the right price-point, then demand will boom. Most everyone wants to be able to fly.
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No, only a small minority of the population has an interest in aviation. Even back when private aviation was at its peak, only a tiny percentage of America was involved.
 
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