Anybody flown it?
Looks like perfect plane. Two engines, 140kt cruise, 30L per hour mogas or avgas ethanol ok, fadec, no mixture, high wing, easy to enter, two doors. Glass avionics not part of the airframe cert so easy to upgrade. Can have deicing. Metal airframe. Why isn’t it more common?
Maybe it’s the payload of 260kg with full fuel. A Top Cub lifts more than that.
Other than that it does look quite appealing.
260kg is quite restricting and not that much of a fuel payload to trade off just 53USG
And like a lot of salesmen they quote a speed at 75% and a fuel consumption at 50% power.
75% on the 912S is about 20 l/h so the 140 KTAS cruise will be 40l/h and 5h total endurance. 30l/h is probably closer to 120 KTAS.
I’ve got about 30hrs on them, I really like them but they are of course a different kind of twin to your Seneca and DA42 comparisons in terms of design and build. Airborne cruise is realistically 130kts and 36lts/hour consumption and you do have to trade fuel / payload, also you often have to ballast in rear baggage compartment to ensure c of g remains within limits with rear seats occupied. However 3 people and a decent endurance is quite possible, but they are not your full it to the max and go for hours type machines. It is also worth mentioning the take off and landing performance which is immense – they are very usable for many airfields which other twins couldn’t get near.
On paper I think its a brilliant aircraft. I love those Rotax engines. However as far as I was aware they hadn’t put the fuel injected version into the airframe. The fuel injected engine is 7KG heavier and I wounder if that’s got anything to do with it.
However all the schools that brought them seem to have moved them on or have them up for sale. Having spoken to one instructor who flies them he commented that that even though they only have cica 700 hours on them the interiors look heavily worn.
The 260kg payload wouldn’t be too much of a limitinig factor with flight training so it does make me wonder that there is something wrong with them as they are not selling that well. Or perhaps the DA42 is simply cheaper to operate in the training role.
At the time it came out, it looked like a plane designed for the FTO / ATPL training business which needs 2 engines to produce “ME” pilots for the airlines.
With the poor utility value (range etc) it wasn’t ever going to be successful in replacing the old piston twins in private ownership – a scene which had been dying out for years but had been somewhat revitalised by the DA42.
The problem with that approach is that it is somewhat cynical, and cynical marketing rarely works. When an FTO is done with it, the product has a poor residual value because there is almost no private/touring market. You also get almost no self fly hire business out of it in the meantime, but you can get it with a DA42 (need to be fairly careful who you let fly it; a local FTO has pulled a plug on theirs, due to damage).
I haven’t flown them, but at the AERO I have sat in one of them and they are extremely small and cramped. I am not the smallest guy around (196cm), but I had the seat foll down and full aft, could barely use the aileron and still wasn’t able to sit straight. I have more room in a Cessna 150 and even the beech Duke has more room (although I can’t sit in it, either).
I don’t see much of a owner value to it, it was really developed for the trainer market only and those seem to be getting rid of them too.
Used prices are basically level with a DA42 and you can get a Piper Seneca for 30-40k Euros these days and fly for a couple of years with the difference on a much more capable airframe.
Also from an owner’s point of view I’d be vary of the G1000 on any airframe, see related threads.
I’ve been looking at the used twin market for a while as it can be attractive when talking IFR and long range flying and I keep returning to either the Twin Commanche (Turbo if possible) or, as the very easy solution, to the PASE II / III, which have the advantage of being FIKI.
(for arguments sake: A Tecnam costs between 230 and 250k these days, while you can get a decent Twin Com or PASE for about 50 k. That is up to a whopping 200k you can spend to upgrade and fly the older twin. A good Seneca with AP and will cost around 300 Euros to fly per hour, if you calculate 50k for upgrades to be done you can end up with up to 500 hours you can fly before you reach even the purchase price of a Tecnam, not counting the costs per hour!)
