Cessna Crushes Remaining Skycatcher Inventory

Sad!....We have one on the field. I've flown it, and seemed OK to me.

Jim
 
If they're going to just destroy them, I would've taken one off their hands. That's a bummer!
 
It would be interesting to know their reason for doing this.
 
Very sad. Not sure why they didn't just sell them at whatever price they could get. They have two of them at my home airport. I have flown them and they are a nice little plane.
 
Stingray Don said:
Very sad. Not sure why they didn't just sell them at whatever price they could get. They have two of them at my home airport. I have flown them and they are a nice little plane.
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Grum.Man said:
That's a shame. They could of donated them to aviation schools, high schools, colleges... So much good could have come even if they weren't flyable.
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Agreed! Seem's like this would've hurt their bottom line.
 
Were these the Chinese-made airframes? Maybe they found something they didn't want getting out?

Maybe they just didn't want to have to support them in the future? Dunno - seems like they could have parted them out somehow, even if they didn't want them to fly.
 
We look at these airframe parts and landing gear and engines and avionics and on and on and see it as a huge waste - which it is.

But from Textron's view, liability probably played a part.

Plus, to remove, itemize, ship, store and distribute so many parts would have been a "non-trivial" undertaking. And with finite resources, they probably compared it to their profit margin on each jet sold, and made the rational decision that their efforts were best applied elsewhere.

Kind of reminds me of the story told here:

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Ryanb said:
Explain? Curious about this.
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Easy. Sell, give away etc. 20 years later a special snowflake is killed doing stupid pilot tricks. Cessna is sued for 40 bazillion dollars.

Cheaper in the long run to write them all off and crush.
 
ChemGuy said:
Easy. Sell, give away etc. 20 years later a special snowflake is killed doing stupid pilot tricks. Cessna is sued for 40 bazillion dollars.

Cheaper in the long run to write them all off and crush.
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Is that just because Cessna decided to stop production and not support the 162 any further? Cause the same could be said for their other models and outstanding 162 fleet.
 
I work for a company where part of the business is refurbishing electronics.
Most of our vendors ensure we have a lot of new product on hand to ship to people.
DJ Bob returns a digital mixer, we give him a new one, and repair the old one.

It saddens me when they send a destroy order.
Model 2.0 of some $1000 piece of equipment comes out and we get the order to drill holes the stock on our shelves and send it off to the recycler.

It has value but the mfg wants it out of circulation for one reason or another.
 
Why take on all the extra liability with no current or future profit?

I guess they ran the numbers over the long haul and didn't like what they saw.

Or they were effed up and needed to be crushed anyways.
 
Ryanb said:
It saddens me when they send a destroy order.
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I have heard that when Lightspeed takes in a headset on trade (a great deal for consumers, BTW), they go right into a crusher.

Which also seems a waste but can be a rational choice for them as well.

Historically, unsold books just had the covers returned to the publisher and the books themselves destroyed.
 
Ryanb said:
Is that just because Cessna decided to stop production and not support the 162 any further? Cause the same could be said for their other models and outstanding 162 fleet.
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Given the option, Textron would gleefully crush every 162 they can get their hands on.
 
FastEddieB said:
I have heard that when Lightspeed takes in a headset on trade (a great deal for consumers, BTW), they go right into a crusher.

Which also seems a waste but can be a rational choice for them as well.

Historically, unsold books just had the covers returned to the publisher and the books themselves destroyed.
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Understood, but strange your quote tagged me as saying, "it saddens me when they send a destroy order." because I never said that LOL where did that come from?
 
Everskyward said:
It would be interesting to know their reason for doing this.
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One story is that a large shipment of aircraft were improperly packaged for shipment and had bad corrosion by the time they were unpacked in the US. This picture was posted to Facebook, and is claimed to be the aircraft that are being destroyed. Note they're all sitting on the bottoms of crates, with plexiglass still covered, paperwork taped to the windshield, identical lifting straps installed on the wing roots, and the closest airplane, at least, sitting with dessicant plugs in its engine.

This may just be a file photo of Skycatchers arriving... but it was included with several showing destruction of airframes. If it does show what it claims to (e.g., airplanes about to be destroyed) then the story about corrosion is likely true.
skycatcher.jpg

If so, there's probably an insurance company involved, here. It's very possible that Cessna, Continental, and the avionics manufacturers demanded the equipment be destroyed to avoid future liability.

[Edit: The information on the link Matthew posted, and the AvWeb article on this, indicates this was inventory left over from when Cessna took the 162 off the market two years ago. Probably a better explanation.]

Ron Wanttaja
 
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wanttaja said:
One story is that a large shipment of aircraft were improperly packaged for shipment and had bad corrosion by the time they were unpacked in the US. This picture was posted to Facebook, and is claimed to be the aircraft that are being destroyed. Note they're all sitting on the bottoms of crates, with plexiglass still covered, paperwork taped to the windshield, identical lifting straps installed on the wing roots, and the closest airplane, at least, sitting with dessicant plugs in its engine.

This may just be a file photo of Skycatchers arriving... but it was included with several showing destruction of airframes. If it does show what it claims to (e.g., airplanes about to be destroyed) then the story about corrosion is likely true.
skycatcher.jpg

If so, there's probably an insurance company involved, here. It's very possible that Cessna, Continental, and the avionics manufacturers demanded the equipment be destroyed to avoid future liability.

Ron Wanttaja
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Now that theory makes the most sense!
 
Ryanb said:
Understood, but strange your quote tagged me as saying, "it saddens me when they send a destroy order." because I never said that LOL where did that come from?
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Weird - that was SixPapaCharlie. Pretty sure I hit "reply" to his post, to bring up his post which I then edited down.

Call it cosmic rays!
 
Ryanb said:
Now that theory makes the most sense!
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Actually, reading the link Matthew posted and the AvWeb article on this, it sounds like this was just unsold inventory, left over from when they stopped sales.

Ron Wanttaja
 
I've been flying Skycatchers almost exclusively for a year-and-a-half, and other than the weight limitation, it's a pretty capable little airplane. My main complaint is that the seats get uncomfortable on long flights.

One thing that's worrisome is that I read in another thread that Cessna was neither coming up with nor allowing an ADS-B out solution for the airplane.
 
Palmpilot said:
I've been flying Skycatchers almost exclusively for a year-and-a-half, and other than the weight limitation, it's a pretty capable little airplane. My main complaint is that the seats get uncomfortable on long flights.
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A memory foam seat cushion helps on those longer flights.

Palmpilot said:
One thing that's worrisome is that I read in another thread that Cessna was neither coming up with nor allowing an ADS-B out solution for the airplane.
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I imagine that many of the existing Skycatchers will go ELSA after 2020.
 
Matthew said:
Were these the Chinese-made airframes? Maybe they found something they didn't want getting out?

Maybe they just didn't want to have to support them in the future? Dunno - seems like they could have parted them out somehow, even if they didn't want them to fly.
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My thoughts exactly.
 
ChemGuy said:
Fixed that for you....
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Most of those are covered under GARA, the last flycatcher won't age out of liability until 2031. Had they gone and sold the remaining stock, they would have pushed that out even further.

There are 30,000+ 172s in the market, Textron is still making money off the occasional factory spare part. There are only 275 skycatchers, so even the spares are going to be a loss business. This is not a Citation where you sell parts by adding two zeros to the part number.
 
What a sad day for airplane owners....

What an exciting day for equipment operators,..!!!
 
Zeldman said:
What a sad day for airplane owners....

What an exciting day for equipment operators,..!!!
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They have to be one heck of a heartless bastard to crush those airframes! I wish they could be used as a ceiling decoration or something like that rather than just throw them into the trash.
 
I got to tear down a house one time with an excavator. What a blast..!!!!
 
Kind of makes my SkyCruncher nickname for them a little more ironic!
 
I have a Cessna rep in my EAA Chapter. This year at Sun n Fun we asked about them donating one to a flying club we were starting. He told us then that they were all scrapped.
 
Acrodustertoo said:
They have to be one heck of a heartless bastard to crush those airframes! I wish they could be used as a ceiling decoration or something like that rather than just throw them into the trash.
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It's all downhill after the first swipe with the loader (or whatever they're using). :)

One of my jobs at work is scrapping experimental engines. It's kind of a stress reliever and fun to just take a hammer and a drill to an engine and render it scrap. Most of the stuff we scrap is junk or not terribly special but one of them I specifically questioned before I destroyed it was the one that had a $50k piston and liner in it (yes, I typed that correctly) due to the costs of the piston. Hopefully someone won't go looking for that engine or at least the piston out of it again because it is gone. I'm sure there are other expensive parts that we've scrapped but oftentimes it isn't as obvious what is special as the piston one was.
 
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