Mooney makes a comeback

You know what, Urs?… You would make for a great Mooney sales rep! Seriously.
However, you still fail to understand that it is not all all about efficiency. Still your are talking only about that.
In reality, the customers also have several other requirments. The market of the last years is proof for that.
In fact, looking back into “aviation history”, the most succesful designs have always been those which were the “best compromise” between certain desirable qualities.
Mooney on the hand has always focussed on efficiency, making them a niche player.
However, the sad truth is that, while in the seventies, a “niche player” sold several hundred aircraft a year (as opposed to several thousands sold by Cessna), nowadays, the “market” is only worth about 900 aircraft per year total. Worldwide. Which, for a niche player like Mooney, means selling 20, maybe 25 aircraft. Can anyone make some serious money on that?

One more word about Cirrus. Everybody is free to think whatever he likes, but one thing is a fact: over the last 10 years, they have been only manufacturer that constantly, each and every year, developed and improved their products in a significant manner (btw also during the more difficult years!), making the them leader of the industry. This doesn’t come from nothing. It costs a lot of money, gents! So much about people always moaning about there being no progress in GA. They sure did their part. Monopoly? Sure isn’t their fault, but the fault of others.
At the same time, Cessna, but even Diamond, did not go anyhere near that pace. Let alone Mooney…
So that’s another difference between the seventies and today: at the time, Mooney was at least on par (product-wise) with their competitors. Today, they are several years behind. Not really a good starting point for a restart, is it?

That same debate went on for years after Socata dropped the piston line, around 2005. They actually dropped it in 2002 but didn’t admit it till 2005

What would a revamped TB20/21 have to look like?

Obviously a G1000 – that means a complete redesign of the 3-section instrument panel. That’s the easy bit!

Then you have to do something interesting enough to take on Cirrus.

I think it would have to have been a substantially lower price. The TB20 was about €220k+VAT in 2002. If you put down some “back of a fag packet” figures, it becomes obvious that most of the retail price is made up of

• 15% dealer margin (what for – European dealers were pointless – Socata could have easily serviced Europe out of Tarbes – and most of the US ones did even less)

• a large number of manual labour hours

Both can be attacked.

The 1st one is easy: forget dealers, sell direct, pocket the margin and offer a superior customer service.

The 2nd one needs an investment in two things: tooling, and building big batches (say 1000 pieces) of the dirt-cheap-to-make pressed components which cost almost nothing to make but consume an awful lot of manual labour if made in small amounts. Also contract out stuff like the wiring harness to somewhere cheap, possibly China (which isn’t dirt cheap anymore but is still a fraction of the 1st World price). However stuff like ARINC429 reduces the wiring substantially.

But all that needs a good production engineer to be in charge, and needs a long term committment.

Which, for a niche player like Mooney, means selling 20, maybe 25 aircraft. Can anyone make some serious money on that?

$20M/year, with say a 50% gross margin, is a pretty good business! My guess is that the whole Piper piston spare parts business is worth a few $M a year only, and the Mooney spares line even less.

I do not think that there is enough MARKET for any old design to compete with Cirrus.
And I do not see how such a production could EVER be made much cheaper. To develop the machines and tools to automate the production of a light plane you’d probably spend a BILLION Euros … For selling 100 planes?

The only chance I see for ANY competitor to take away market share form Cirrus is to develop a completely new plane. To be able to compete with Cirrus it HAS to have a BRS system, but what would make it really attractive would be a completely reliable Jet Fuel/Diesel engine with FADEC and so on. Goal: No engine failures, like what we are used to from cars. And affordable operating costs.

Maybe if Cessna, Beech and Mooney did it together they could pull it off. But I don’t really see an investor who would put 500 million dollars into such an enterprise when in today’s world you can make more money producing iPhone sleeves and chargers in China.

In 1996 Alan Klapmeier of Cirrus told me the story what it was like to find 70 million dollars on Wall Street (or was it fifty, can’t remember now) for certifying the SR20. And you bet that it would be twice that amount today to certify a completely new aircraft AND (!) it’s production. ANYBODY can build a NICE prototype (want some example of nice prototypes that were never heard of again?) – but to set up a professional production, customer support and so on … that’s where all of them fail.

The only chance I see for ANY competitor to take away market share form Cirrus is to develop a completely new plane. To be able to compete with Cirrus it HAS to have a BRS system, but what would make it really attractive would be a completely reliable Jet Fuel/Diesel engine with FADEC and so on. Goal: No engine failures, like what we are used to from cars. And affordable operating costs.

I would agree, except fot the last bit.

The past has taught that innovation has never made flying more affordable. It always made airplanes, faster, nicer, more comfortable, etc. But never more affordable. And I guess that will always be the case.

When Thielert came around in the early 2000s, many people naively said “ah, now flying will become more affordable.” Haha! And I am not talking about the bancruptcy disaster here. Even without that, they would have always priced the engine and the spare parts just so that the total operating costs would have been the same for most. This would have maximized their profit as people would still have given the Thielert engine the preference, just due to the “wow”, “new” and “cool” factors. BWL, 1. Semester!

Or just look at the new prices of the SR22 from 2001 till today…innovation.

This talk of lack of a market for new SEPs makes me wonder if there is more of a market for revamped second hand aircraft. Clearly there is a market for turbine conversions (the Jetprop and Silver Eagle have proved that). Is there a similar market for diesel conversions that don’t ruin the useful load?

There are loads of relatively low hours airframes available. The development costs to put a diesel engine into an existing airframe would be an order of magnitude less than for a whole new aircraft – and the time intensive airframe manufacturing work has already been done.

My ideal converted airframe would (in order of importance) have:

• Ceiling around 20k ft
• 0 fuel Range of approx 1200nm with full fuel
• Full fuel payload of 200kg (2 people)
• Aspen/G500 and GTN, or even better a fully integrated G2000 (the former would cost just about 0 in development costs though)
• Diesel engine with FADEC that “just works”
• BRS (whatever anyone says, this is nice to have at night and/or over mountains)
• TCAS
• Digital autopilot with a level button (as a bonus with envelope protection) – I hear the DFC90/100 is very nice

I would pay about 300k EUR for this today if it existed.

Edit: this is of course exactly what redbird are doing with the redhawk – just with a less capable airframe.

Even without that, they would have always priced the engine and the spare parts just so that the total operating costs would have been the same for most.

Well, yes, nobody wants to destroy the market by bombing the price.

It is just too tempting to build “just under” the market leader. But that will work only if you offer a superior feature set. How can that be done to beat Cirrus? I cannot see any way.

That is usually easy to do in IT/computer/technology products – because most of them have feature sets crippled by “usability committee” decisions, or requirements to maintain a product range with progressive feature sets (with progressive pricing…). Such a product range is usually easy to attack by a focused newcomer who comes in, with just one product, halfway up your beautifully structured product range, with a price equal to the bottom of your range, and eats your biggest cash cow for lunch

But in GA, Cirrus has set the standard on the feature set, so a lower price is the only way.

Jwoolard,

well, I guess you would have to

-buy a nice clean copy of a 1980 C182 with a runout engine (70k)
-put the above avionics in (60k)
-get the BRS STC (how much is that, 50k?)
-get the latest SMA iteration as an STC (100k?)

So, I guess it can be done for 300k. The question is, as always, would many people do it, when they can, for 250k, get an aircraft which

-is 25 years younger
-has almost all of the above (except the Jet-A burning engine)
-goes almost 50 knots faster?

As long as Avgas is available in central Europe (and the customer doesn’t go to exotic places all too often), the answer is probably no.

Alexis,

this time you were fast enough :) and I back fast enough from shopping. Corrected.

Krister,

Not the same powerplant (IO360 vs IO390) and manufacturer’s figures. It’s been a while since I set up this table and that is what Pipistrel then posted in an article. 200 kts @ 12 GPH. I’d have to try to find it back. The 180 kts is simply an assumption on my part, based also on what we wrote in here. As I said, in any case they put everyone in the pocket if they reach these figures, be it 200 or 180 kts.

The “J” figures are from Mooney but also what several Mooniacs post as their flight planning value, they are pretty representative and proven. For the C Model, I see 9 GPH at 140 kts, that is from experience but corresponds pretty much to the book too, which is a bit more optimistic.

Boscomontico – fair point!

Don’t get me wrong: I like the SR22, a lot.

IMO the only thing that could be done to improve the cirrus would be a Diesel engine – and even then, that’s only because I would like to go places that don’t have avgas easily available, for most people I don’t think it really matters.

Maybe I should just buy a second hand SR22 – I’m somewhere between that, or an Ovation (I like the extended fuel tanks for more adventurous trips), or a TB20.