Epic turboprop

I may be looking at the wrong airplanes but I recall that normal GA planes went from drawing board to certified in 2-3 years and cost a fraction of what they cost today.

In 1970, Grumman decided to make a 4 seater out of the AA1 trainer, it flew and was certified as the Traveller in 1972. That is two years. The consequent upgrade to the Tiger took even less time.
In 1955, Piper comissoned the Comanche. It flew first in 56 and deliveries started in 57.

Basically before the crash of the GA market in the consequence of the insurance crisis in the early 80ties, hardly any plane took more than 2-3 years to see the customers hangar after becoming an idea in the engineers head.

Today? Or shall we say recently, as no new airplane has seen the light of certification in years?
The SR20 took about 5 years if you discount the work the Klapmeiers had done before.

The Vision Jet took 12 years even though it was flying already in 2008….

Since then, how many new GA planes have reached certification? And which company managed to do it without going bancrupt?

That is why we are flying with up to 70 year old designs and equally old engines. The certification process and cost is no longer achievable in America (apparently slightly better in Europe as there were some significant planes released here) unless money invested is so much that it can never be recovered. The consequence is simple: People forego certification and turn to kit planes because they don’t need any.

The same goes for new instruments. If a new GPS takes 5-6 years to certify, it is totally outdated when it reaches the market.

So basically, the US airplane industry has folded development almost totally and today has returned building of new GA planes to amateurs, because certification criteria are such, that no company can profitably meet them. And they fly their planes using Ipads.

Cessna folded on the Skycatcher as they could not manage to certify it. That is a 2 seat trainer folks. So the Cessna 150 all of a sudden is a real value again…

I’ve heard some stories out of the M10 development at Mooney, they quite naively thought once first flight is achieved the hard part is over. Wrong by a huge measure. So in order to get something new out of the door, they had to revert to upgrading the M20 yet again, which they did in a respectably short time. Whether they can ever return to the M10 to finish it is totally open, at least the prototype was not thrown out but flown to Kerrville not too long ago. I understand they still are working on it.

This is a declaration of bancruptcy for the whole sector. Yes, the US are working on easier certification rules but they better hurry up before all their companies are sold to China or bancrupt. Or wait, too late for that.

And we don’t need to talk price. A new GA plane in the 1950ties to 1970ties cost 30-40k $, today they cost 500k to 1 million. Totally unrealistic but a consequence of huge development cost. At the time, people said, the price of a new plane is like for a good house. Today, a pretty neat home in the US can be had for 200k but no new plane is to be had below at least tripple that. So who should buy them in sufficient numbers to justify the huge development cost?

The Epic factory is a short walk from our hangar. They have a pretty large set of buildings. The buildings are full of airplanes under construction. They have now, and have had for probably 2 years, quite a large number of employees. I don’t know their certification status, but I do know they have had a lot of employees working on the issue over a period of years. I hear rumors that certification is “very soon”. But I have heard these same rumors for “quite a while”.

We have had several of the experimental Epics in our hangar for annuals. They are impressive airplanes.

And we see Epics taxiing, departing, and arriving pretty frequently. I think they are units both for flight test and customer airplanes built, but not yet delivered.

Epic is definitely working hard at certification and aircraft deliveries.

Close to TBM

Wow, better payload, time to altitude, cabin differential. This is where it beats the TBM.

Things advanced a little during certification. Should add five blade prop, G3000 and maybe the new PT6.

Tbm has better image and is probably better finished, then I would say better handling (this is purely imagined as I didn’t fly any of these), as epic/ lancair plane are known to be quick but handling decrease rapidly with speed. Anyway a nice plane, we us d to have one sometimes in LFMD…
Edit: actually I thought it was a E1000 but in fact it was the LT who crashed earlier this year…

Sorry to be so direct, but you haven’t seen one, you haven’t flown one, so how on earth can you say that one is better finished or handles better than the other. The epic / lancair handling statement is about as valid as saying “a Cessna 152 has good slow speed handling, so a Mustang will be easy to fly at slow speed”/