Graham wrote:
I’m not sure what particular axe you have to grind but statements like that make you come across as a really unpleasant character. Before this latest news you crowed and gloated over affected customers, telling them to man up and that it was only a problem because they weren’t proper builders. Now you blame them for killing the company.
Read what I wrote then, and in context, and stop putting words in my mouth and “meaning” to my sentences.
We don’t know everything here, and probably never will. We also don’t know how this will end up. It could go really bad, but could also end up just fine. One thing we do know for sure is that their kit prices will rise, and by a whole lot. One way to view this is that Vans have been selling their kits way too cheap over a long time, decades. Mikael Via has entered as the CEO now. That is NOT a good sign.
@LeSving wrote:
Read what I wrote then, and in context, and stop putting words in my mouth and “meaning” to my sentences.
We don’t know everything here, and probably never will. We also don’t know how this will end up. It could go really bad, but could also end up just fine. One thing we do know for sure is that their kit prices will rise, and by a whole lot. One way to view this is that Vans have been selling their kits way too cheap over a long time, decades. Mikael Via has entered as the CEO now. That is NOT a good sign
I think @graham post was accurate. He was actually being kind.
@LeSving, I’m not sure what particular axe you have to grind but statements like that make you come across as a really unpleasant character. Before this latest news you crowed and gloated over affected customers, telling them to man up and that it was only a problem because they weren’t proper builders. Now you blame them for killing the company. The leadership killed the company with multiple breathtakingly stupid decisions – using lasers in the first place, having zero traceability, and zero QC. Customers only expected to get what they were sold, contracted for and paid for – punched parts (their sales materials describe everything as punched) that are fit for purpose. Your comment about “having to replace a couple of parts” shows you know absolutely nothing of the issue, and for that reason I’m not surprised you cannot empathise with people who are out five-figure sums with expensive piles of scrap sitting in their workshops and very little chance of redress
As others pointed out the LCP issue was just the straw that broke the camels back. There were so many bad decisions and other QC issues that I have lost count. VAF did a good job in the past of playing cover for Van’s and enabling the poor businesses practices. It was only a matter of time before poor management and customer service caught up to them. If it wasn’t the LCP issue it would have been something else. We all want Van’s to succeed but not as a poorly managed company.
RV8Bob wrote:
We all want Van’s to succeed but not as a poorly managed company.
Well, what we will get now is (IMO at this point in time), a stripped down, but extremely well run company (if thing goes well). There will be one or two airplanes to choose from, and all of them will be “builder assist” short build time aircraft. You will have to go to the factory to “build” them. A finished aircraft will have a cost for the end user of at least twice as much as today (realistically 3 to 4). About the same as the Glasairs ended up i would guess, US$ 250-350k.
Perhaps the -3 and -4 will be left untouched, as they already are low cost and low risk, and are of special value to Van himself. They are chosen by a different kind of builders than the -14 and -10. We can only hope.
RV8Bob wrote:
I think @graham post was accurate. He was actually being kind.
Kind? 
This is nonsense. The thing is, you will now get exactly what you have been asking for (but only if thing goes well). High quality kits, high quality “builder assist” with a guarantee that you will get a high quality aircraft in the end. The downside is that you won’t actually build it, and you have to pay real dollars to get it (250-350k, maybe even more, instead of 100-150k).
Let’s hope it doesn’t happen, but how else is Vans going to be profitable by any business meaning of the word? Van himself clearly wants his money back. The money he has lent to the company to keep it afloat the last couple of months. Any other new investor is not putting money in the company for charity. A “factory assist” carbon Cub starts at what 300k? today. This is a tube and fabric aircraft, a 1930 design. Even the kit is well above 200k today. There’s no doubt there are lots of people willing to pay 3-400k for “factory builder assisted” RV-10 for instance. This is much more profitable for the factory, and MUCH less risk for the factory.
But, by the looks of it, it can go very bad. The company is de facto bankrupt at the moment. We will see what the next week brings. I had no idea it was that bad.
Another amusing thing here is VAF that is brought up all the time. What relevance has VAF here? Admins at VAF, who cares what they say or mean or do?
In many ways the kit industry, especially Vans by the looks of it, has outgrown the reason to even exist. They are producing kits for people who really would rather have a factory built aircraft, but don’t want to pay for a factory built aircraft. Then what exactly do you get? In this case a big mess. CubCrafters has found the recipe, and it starts at 200k as an entry ticket and continues up to 6-700k.
It will be interesting to see what comes out of this re-structuring at Vans. If they somehow manage to keep the -3 and -4 untouched, then there is still hope. If not, it’s China next.
The thing is, you will now get exactly what you have been asking for (but only if thing goes well). High quality kits, high quality “builder assist” with a guarantee that you will get a high quality aircraft in the end. The downside is that you won’t actually build it, and you have to pay real dollars to get it (250-350k, maybe even more, instead of 100-150k).
You say that people put words in your mouth when they nearly quote you and then you put words in our mouth. Who said we want a certified aircraft? We just want the quality that was available 2 years ago and was advertised. Instead of parts that have become brittle due to heat and crack at every dimple.
A 5 page “assessment” that goes against 100 years of standards and doesn’t correctly define primary and secondary structure is not convincing.
I doubt they will offer only “builder assist” but prices are going to go way up. They obviously should have been higher before if that’s what it takes to have some level of QC and proper management. Maybe some models will be dropped.
I don’t know what happens in bankruptcy but I hope they are smart enough to have already started that process or else they are going to get a lot of credit card companies trying to collect soon.
How can prices go so high? This is mostly sheet metal. I buy “aviation” aluminium sheet and it costs peanuts.
And with no certification, they don’t need to do anything with it. No internal paperwork, no QA. They need to do no more than if selling outdoor furniture.
Absolutely right Peter. All the builders want is a place to go to buy the materials the plans for the aircraft call for. I don’t get LeSving’s argument at all. Vans have made 2 big mistakes all along as far as I can see and it was a 3rd brought those mistakes to a head.
The 2 big mistakes were no quality control (or they expected customers to be their quality control) and no traceability so they have no idea what went to who.
The 3rd mistake which brought it to a head was to introduce new production techniques without the 1st and 2nd in place.
This is just bad management pure and simple.
Other than inflation the costs should only rise by the cost of putting quality control and traceability in place.
The management have ruined what was a good and until recently,successful brand .
Any new management will have to rebuild the brand name and any new investor will of course want a return on investment. Doubling the price will not do that. Other than a fool, no one buys a product that has bad reviews for quality control and pays more than the competition for it.
I don’t know which of the Vans models are the most popular and more profitable. But they are the areas I would be looking at. No offense but why buy and build an RV6 (good as it appears to be from the reviews here) when you can buy and build an RV7.
Vans can rise again but it will need a good manager to do it with a good PR advisor along with time and some money. How much? That is the problem born out of lack of traceability.
@gallois you can’t buy an RV6 kit any more, it was replaced by the RV7 20 years ago :)
I believe you can currently buy RV7, 8, 9, 10, 12 and 14 kits, with the 15 under development. Given that the mfg processes and tooling are about the same for all of them, consolidation of the line may not make too much difference.
IMO if Vans want to stay in business they have to write to all builders who might have laser cut parts and simply ask them if they wish replacement non laser cut parts.
This will quickly give them an idea of the cost of replacement and where the parts are located.
From that they can quickly estimate the cost of either of recalling or simply sending out new parts. All at Vans cost.
There will be difficulties such as builders who have already built with the laser cut parts. Some may be happy others will need to agree some sort of solution.
If this is done properly your brand name can start to recover.
At the same time as doing this Vans should employ a production accountant to work out whether or not they are making enough profit on each piece sold to be a viable concern. From the posts on here it would appear that they may have been a bit underpriced before this debacle.
An investor or investors will then know how much they will have to put in and whether or not it can ever be
If it is not possible to manufacture parts and pay off loans, all you have left is a name and (possibly) some intellectual property plus some CAD drawlings. There may also be some tooling. But as outsourcing seems to have been the root of much of the problem, there may not be a lot of that.
The Vans brand name itself will have a value but not as much as it did before. But someone might buy it.
Alternatively, there are a lot of Vans enthusiasts who might well invest in keeping the brand going. It is after all only a brand and some plans/engineering drawings at the base level.
Against both of these last 2 is the question of who owns the property that Vans occupies.
If its leasehold the landlord still has to be paid which then leaves a declaration of bankruptcy as the only solution.
I agree with @gallois – lack of QC is what put Van’s in this situation. Probably as well the desire to service all the many new customers that came all at once due to Covid, and the incredible developments in the RV-14 kit that make building an aircraft much more accessible.
Many years ago I worked in a machine shop that made slip rings for helicopters. It was a two-person operation, the owner and me. I did both the manufacturing and the QC. This can work when you have extremely motivated employees, but it does not scale, and any system that relies on humans not making a mistake will fail.
I have had a 2-person business for 30+ years, and a bigger one before that, and it does scale if the owner keeps his “finger on the pulse”. If e.g. he goes off flying for weeks 
then stuff could well fall apart.
A legendary (to some of the right age and job) example was Gary Kildall who, according to legend, was out flying his plane when Bill Gates called asking if Gary could license him his CP/M operating system. Gary’s wife took the call and gave Bill short thrift, and the rest is history (Bill went elsewhere to get MS-DOS written).
I’ve seen this too in my business (in the 1st one, 1978-1991). When you are making a sh*itload of money (I wasn’t personally because we had 30+ employees) you step back and let things run… into some rocks probably.
This will make any suitably pompous ISO9000 (one of the biggest scams of recent decades) quality manager revolve in his grave at 2400rpm, but with really good QA you don’t need traceability because you can be sure nobody will get bad parts. Traceability is needed only if you sometimes drop the ball and ship out defective parts. And somehow Vans managed to screw up even something really simple like a visual inspection. This is bits of sheet metal, after all.
In my business I have traceability on the more pricey products (by S/N) and that saved our skin once, many years ago (posted before). But, you know what, I have had customers who dismantle the product so they can swap over the part on which the S/N sticker is, so they can send something back under warranty Not knowing the S/N is also held in a FLASH chip inside… and the other day I got this from one of Switzerland’s most reputable industrial companies!
Anyway that’s digressing. Vans should have been doing some obvious stuff. I suspect the place was really sloppy, with shelves with stacks of parts all over the place and little segregation of different stock. There is a firm not far from here which machines up millions of titanium and stainless body piercing parts (a great working-class fashion ) and their place is like that. Mountains of pins and rings everywhere.
