Cessna Commits to Efficient Turbo-Diesel Aircraft
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The new airplane, called the Cessna 182 NXT, made its first appearance at Airventure here in Oshkosh and will match the performance of the existing gasoline-powered version, while burning around 30 percent less fuel.**
If only they’d commit to selling airplanes. 
(I don’t know anyone who has a half-million simleons for a Skylane.)
Word.
Five of us kids split a 172 in 1980 for about 3 grand apiece so’s we could learn us some flyin’.
Leased it to the flight school, and basically flew for gas cost.
Good times.
Does the FAA or the airport do anything to you when things like that occur?
I’m sure they both take a dim view of it, but did you pay any fines or fees?
No.
The FAA doesn’t require you to report an accident unless someone was injured or over $25k of damage was done and in this case there wasn’t any damage at all. I think they would have considered this a poor choice of a parking spot.
The airport itself was just a strip of asphalt with some numbers painted on it in the middle of some sand dunes. Someone in a nearby house saw what happened and came over in his truck with a rope to pull me out.
Even if the FAA had found out, somehow, they wouldn’t fine me for a mistake like that unless they thought I’d been breaking a regulation. As a private pilot the most likely “punishment” would be to require me to take another lesson. They’re much more strict with commercial pilots, of course.
[QUOTE=Pixel_Dent;16536418 I think they would have considered this a poor choice of a parking spot.
[/QUOTE]
Thanks, Pixel.
hell it doesn’t look like he pulled any G’s at all. I had more fun landing in bad weather coming back from OSH.
30 years later, the cheapest Cessna costs 100 times that much. (I remember a Christmas Eve episode of The Price Is Right from 1981 or 1982 where they gave away a full-size plane (not a microlight) plus 100 hours worth of lessons, and it cost around $32,000.)
What caused the cost of planes to skyrocket?
Liability insurance. A number of lawsuits against Cessna and Piper in the 70’s and 80’s made both companies unwilling or unable to make small, affordable planes. Then you got your V-35s killing doctors left and right and it’s a wonder we have any planes left at all! 
Seriously, it’s the lawsuits. Whiny family members blame the plane instead of the pilot whenever one goes down.
Do what you’re supposed to, where you’re supposed to, and don’t run out of gas, and you’ll hardly ever lose a plane!
If the plane was so equipped, and the pilot wanted to be an absolute and total SOB, he could have trimmed the plane for level flight and then pulled the ejection ring for his seat. Imagine the expression on his buddy’s face if he did that!
I asked the sales rep for Stoddard-Hamilton why they didn’t have insurance for them:
“Fifty-thousand dollars per seat” This was mid-nineties (just before they crashed and burned).
That’s why they stopped making airplanes. It used to be that aircraft manufacturers were responsible for every aircraft they’d ever built. Consider this hypothetical scenario: An airplane built in the 1930s or 1940s uses common building techniques of the time, but these techniques have been superseded by better techniques. The older way of building airplanes, that was perfectly acceptable and normal at the time, might be found to be a ‘design flaw’ in the 1980s by a jury that knows nothing about airplanes. (The plaintiffs’ lawyers make sure pilots are excluded, and anyone who knows anything about airplanes wouldn’t be allowed to use their ‘special knowledge’ in the jury room.) Or perhaps modern corrosion prevention methods that didn’t exist 60 or 70 years ago were not applied to the aircraft when it was originally built. A jury could very well find that the manufacturer failed to use the modern methods when they built the aircraft, and so they are responsible for a structural failure. The General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994 limited manufacturers’ liability to, I think, 18 years. (There are exceptions, which you can look up yourself.) This was enough to get the Big Three back into making piston-single airplanes again.
I think the back-breaking straw was a case that involved Cessna, and it didn’t involve long-term liability. A husband and wife, both Certified Flight Instructors (CFIs), flew their Cessna into a thunderstorm with predictable results. Even though no GA aircraft are not designed or certified to fly into T-cells, and even though every pilot is instructed to give T-storms a wide berth and it is carefully explained why they shouldn’t fly into them and what will happen if they do, and even though Certified Flight Instructors knew, or should have known, not to fly into a cell, and even though the NTSB investigation found that the airplane’s engine was operating normally at the time of the crash, the family members of the pilots won a $40,000,000 award from Cessna and Lycoming. I think it’s at that point where airplane makers said, ‘You know? If we’re going to be hit with these kinds of settlements – even when the investigation proved that we’re entirely not at fault – we’re not going to make piston-engine singles anymore. We’ll just build corporate aircraft for people who know how to fly, and know better than to fly into adverse weather.’ And so they stopped for 11 years. With GARA, at least they won’t be found liable for a ‘design flaw’ next time some numbskull does something stupid. (Well, if the airplane is old enough.)
So why are airplanes so expensive now? As I said earlier, a brand new Cessna Skyhawk takes 1.5 times more hours of work for a middle-class worker to buy, than it did for a minimum wage earner to buy in 1982. Based on my calculations, a new Skyhawk is between two and two-and-a-half times more expensive than it should be. And even at half the price, it’s a pretty big number for what you’re getting. There’s no reason a Cessna 172 should cost a third of a million dollars!
When airplane manufacturers stopped making piston singles, people still wanted to buy airplanes. The price of used airplanes skyrocketed. As I mentioned, my dad sold his Skyhawk for almost twice what he’d paid for it, and his Skylane for exactly double his purchase price. (Also, airplanes got a lot more hours on them. Most of the newish Cessnas were N-models, and it’s common to see N-models and some P-models with over 10,000 hours on them. So the relative prices are higher, since high-time airplanes would have sold for a lot less in relation to the rest of the fleet than they do now.) When people can’t afford even a used airplane, they are less likely to learn to fly.
When Cessna started making airplanes again after GARA, they introduced the new Skyhawk (172R) at $175,000[sup]1[/sup]. This came as a shock to the flying community. The previous model Skyhawk, the 172P, sold for $49,600 in 1987. Pilots and aviation journalists could not understand why an airplane that had been around for half a century should be so expensive. We all understood that they’d be more expensive than a decade previously, but I think we all expected that $100,000 or thereabouts was the ‘what the market would bear’ price. Remember that the 172 was considered an entry-level four-seater that a middle-class family could afford.
Cessna was sold to General Dynamics in 1985. Since building ‘little airplanes’ was not GD’s primary business, one can see why they would stop building piston-singles and concentrate on their turbine-powered airplanes. In 1992, the Cessna division of GD was sold to Textron. OK, this is where I (personally) see several things coming together, and this is where my own philosophy comes in. I’ve worked for corporations, and my impression of them is that they are always looking for maximum profits, and are not that concerned with ‘need’. For example, they will concentrate on their high-dollar products and make their more affordable products as an afterthought; or they’ll lay off the people who make them their money so that they see a boost in their earnings for a year or two. I think this is short-sighted, and hurts the business in the long run. In the case of airplanes, corporate aircraft are more profitable than private ones. Hold onto that for a minute.
After used airplanes became more expensive and the cost of renting went up, fewer people were learning to fly and the number of active pilots fell sharply. There was still enough demand to keep prices high. It was expected that when Cessna started building piston-singles again, the demand would be met and prices would drop. But production of all aircraft was only about 2,000 or so a year. There just weren’t enough Skyhawks being made to meet the demand. Remember that corporations want to maximise profits. They saw that they could charge a lot more for a product whose R&D and tooling had been paid for many times over. Unfortunately, they forgot why Cessna (yes, I’m picking on Cessna – I’m not as familiar with Piper or Beechcraft) got into the business in the first place – to make airplanes for people to fly. Their target market could no longer afford the product intended for them. The solution is obvious, as I pointed out before with the Henry Ford example: Make more airplanes. That would bring the unit cost down, and more people would buy them. Instead, Cessna looks at the situation and says, ‘Well, no one is buying our airplanes. Obviously we don’t need to increase production.’ They don’t seem to understand that after such a long hiatus, personal flying has fallen off of most people’s radar. It’s not enough to make a product. You need to nurture a market for the product. Cessna fails here. I remember in the 1970s Cessna had their ‘Take Off’ promotion to get people interested in flying. They sold 150s with a bold paint scheme and ‘Take Off’ on the tail. No more. Now it’s like ‘If anyone is interested in airplanes, we make some. They’ll find us on their own.’
Cessna justifies their high prices for an entry-level airplane by claiming there is no demand to make more. They claim that it costs more to make airplanes. Never mind that that the non-Corporate Conglomerate Cessna paid people a living wage, produced thousands of private airplanes each year, and kept prices to where the target market could buy them. Textron can’t, for some reason. It has already been cited that their Model 162 has $20,000 added to the price ‘just because’. They say ‘Well, new Skyhawks are better. The Garmin glass panels alone cost $100,000!’ But most pilots don’t use glass panels. Most pilots are perfectly happy with ‘steam gauges’, perhaps with a portable GPS thrown in for convenience. But they discontinued ‘steam gauge’ panels, and only offer glass panels. ‘But the cost of insurance is so high! We have to pass the costs on to our consumers!’ The cost of insurance was addressed with GARA 1994. They are exposed to much less risk now, than when they stopped making piston-singles in 1987.
Insurance. I think this is the key. Although GARA 1994 addressed liability issues, companies still have to protect themselves against lawsuits. Aviation safety keeps getting better and better, but it’s a fact that low-time pilots in single-engine piston-powered aircraft crash more often than professional pilots. The more low-time, SEL pilots there are, the greater the probability that some will crash. The more crashes there are, the more likely there will be lawsuits. As the husband-and-wife CFI case shows, plaintiffs can win huge awards even when the plaintiffs or their representatives (in the case of survivors suing) are entirely at fault and there’s nothing wrong with the airplane. The old, independent Cessna Aircraft Company was in the business of building airplanes for low-time pilots, and for people who wanted a personal airplane – who often were low-time pilots. Textron is an industrial conglomerate that owns Cessna and Bell Helicopters, and makes golf carts engines, and industrial systems. Old Cessna’s core business was building personal airplanes; Textron’s isn’t. Putting more piston-singles into the hands of ‘Weekend fliers’ increases the risk of expensive lawsuits and drives up insurance premiums. It is in the conglomerate’s best interest to keep people who are A) more likely to crash; and B) potential plaintiffs in lawsuits, away from their products. It’s better to offer products intended for people who are less likely to crash and sue. By building few SELs, the people more likely to afford them are likely to have enough experience not to screw the pooch – and sue. I really think that Textron (and Hawker, which owned Beechcraft [sup]2[/sup]) don’t want to sell ‘little airplanes’.
So why are airplanes so expensive? In summary:
[ul][li]Lawsuits basically doubled the price of airplanes;[/li][li]Airplane manufacturers decided to stop making personal planes because of huge settlements in lawsuits;[/li][li]Scarcity forced prices up;[/li][li]High prices reduced sales, once production restarted;[/li][li]Reduced sales discouraged manufacturers from building enough airplanes;[/li][li]Building fewer airplanes results in a higher production cost per unit;[/li][li]Lower-priced options (e.g., ‘steam gauges’ instead of glass panels) were eliminated;[/li][li]Manufacturers failed (and are failing) to promote their products to the general public, to expand their markets;[/li][li]Expensive aircraft ensure that most buyers will be more experienced flyers and will be less likely to crash and sue.[/ul][/li]
I really think that General Aviation, as it pertains to personal flying, is dying. In 2011 there were 618,660 ‘active’ pilots in the U.S. (That is, they held current medical certificates; not necessarily that they are actually flying. I’m an ‘active pilot’, though it’s been a couple of years since I’ve flown.) This is down from a high of 827,071 active pilots in 1980. The fewer pilots there are, the fewer non-pilots are exposed to General Aviation. We have many more distractions now than we did 30 years ago. Computers, smart phones, and an economy where people are just trying to keep a roof over their heads, let alone take up an expensive hobby, all compete for our time. The market is shrinking.
But there are some bright spots. Cirrus are making their SR series, which is intended for personal flying and flight schools. They’re too expensive for ‘family planes’, but they do provide some competition for Cessna. Based on what I’ve seen at fly-ins, Light Sport Aircraft and homebuilts (notably Van’s RV-series) are very popular. But flying is still beyond most of the middle class that bought so many airplanes through the '70s and even into the '80s. Most people do not have the time to invest in building their own airplane (which is much more expensive than one might think, for one with similar or better performance than one from The Big Three), and many people would rather buy a 40- or 50-year-old four-seater than an LSA.
I think that personal flying, as in ‘Hey, let’s get into the airplane and fly off to see Uncle Joe’, is doomed unless and until factory-made airplanes can be sold for prices families can afford.
[sup][1][/sup]The numbers I have in a paper I wrote say that the price of the 1998 172S was $124,500. I would have to do some research to find out why there is a discrepancy; but I do remember, and I know there exists online, an article in one of the publications decrying the $175,000 price.
[sup][2][/sup]In 2012, Hawker Beechcraft entered bankruptcy. A new, smaller company called Beechcraft Corporation will concentrate on the twin-turboprop King Air, the turboprop T-6/AT-6 Texan II, and the piston-powered Bonanza. Bonanzas are the ‘Cadillac’ of private planes, and too expensive for the entry-level pilot and most aspiring owners. Definitely an upper-middle class machine. They stopped building the Skipper trainer in 1981, and the Musketeer/Sundowner – their answer to the Cessna 172 Skyhawk – in 1983.
you spoke of Cirrus. They were purchased by a Chinese company. That is probably the future of small aviation in the US.
China is also building the Cessna 162 Skycatcher. Cessna claims they cannot offer the 162 at a reasonable price, even with the Chinese labour costs.
There may be advantages to building it overseas. You can sue their distribution system out of existence but not the company.
What gets me is that Textron says they can’t build it economically. Cessna did it, before they were bought out, with any number of their models. The people who made the airplanes had living wages, and the airplanes were cheap enough for an average worker to buy. It’s like I said earlier: Build enough of your product to bring the price down, and pay your workers enough to buy them. But who listens to a bloody Socialist like Henry Ford?
The solution is simple: Build more airplanes, making each one less expensive. Less expensive planes equals more sales, equals more profit. Unfortunately, the idea of plane ownership as it existed in the 1950s through the 1970s has fallen by the wayside. In the past 30 years, people have forgotten about personal flying. Cessna (primarily) has to build a market for their airplanes before they can get back into mass production – assuming they even want to build airplanes.
actually you touched on a problem earlier but didn’t realize it. One of the problems with building a new airplane is that any design changes over the older model means that you’ve now “corrected a flaw”. didn’t you ever wonder why FADEC systems weren’t standard in the 80’s when cars all had computer controlled engines?