LSA Registration Numbers: The Gang of Six!

Winged buddy Dan Johnson and his colleague Jan Fridrich, head of LAMA Europe, just posted Jan's exhaustive parsing of the LSA registration data and came up with some shockers.

 Dan calls it the LSA Market Share Report.  The first thing he notes is apparent stability in the marketplace: overall registration numbers for the first half of 2011 are about the same as last year, he says, so at least the industry didn’t fall off from that tough year. The pace is on track to better 2009's 177 total registrations and 2010's 202.
In 2010, 48 came from Cessna, which, when subtracted from the total, gives you 154 for the whole year for the rest of the fleet. 
So, looking again at 2011's first half of 126, subtracting Cessna's numbers from the total of 126 yields just 72.
Double that (144) and we could end up with even fewer registrations than 2010, (not counting Cessna) although at just 10 less it's not an earthshaking falloff unless you want to be a worrywart and consider 2009, which had 177 total...and none from Cessna.  But we won't go there.
As has been the trend from the beginning, just a handful - six this time - LSA companies racked up 92% of all new registrations!
Remember, these aren’t sales on the book but previous (or future) sales, since these numbers only reflect aircraft registered from Jan. through June with FAA.  For instance, several LSA might come in at one time to a dealer, who might register them all at once before selling any of them.  Or vice versa: some already sold may not have been registered.  Still, the reg numbers provide a pretty accurate glimpse of what's really going on.
And The Gang of Six? 
Cdssna: 54, for almost 43% of all registrations, on the strength of Skycatching-up in production
CubCrafters: 20 for 17%
Czech Aircraft Works: 16 for 13%, which includes formerly-badged PiperSports
American Legend: 11 for 9%
Flight Design (still #1): 10 for 7%.
Jabiru: 5 for 4%
That’s 116 aircraft out of the total of 126.
Now if we throw in Aeropro (Aerotrek models) and its 4 registrations, those top 7 companies account for just over 95% of all 2011 registrations!  That means of all the other 112 manufacturers, only 6 aircraft made the books.

CubCrafters continues to show strong market share

That, my friends, is a hard number to swallow for all those hardy, perservering companies who are still in the game mostly, as the numbers suggest, on a wing and a lot of prayers.
Dan goes on to point out that eight makers have now sold more than 100 aircraft.  In an economy as enduringly painful as a chronic bad tooth, that’s somewhat encouraging.
And even though only 126 aircraft were registered since January 19th...well, 126 aircraft were registered since January 19th!  In other words, the industry is not throwing in the towel, though it’s sure getting a drenching.
Another bellweather of sorts: Cessna’s healthy production has for the first time tipped the market scales toward the U.S.: we registered more aircraft than offshore producers in 2011.
Cessna is now 8th (13th six months ago), based on 54 Skycatchers registered.  That’s like watching an insider stock chart shoot for the moon! 
And with a goodly percentage of those highly-touted initial 1000 orders still on the books, Cessna will only continue to leapfrog the rest at the top of the list for the foreseeable future, at least until purse strings not only among the merely well-off but the uber-rich loosen up, because right now, not many people in any income category are buying much of anything considered a luxury.
Some surprising numbers, as my reader Thomas pointed out in a comment to my previous blog post:
Five major makers, all in the top 20,  narrowly missed striking out completely in registrations the first six months!
Four of them - Tecnam, TL Ultralight (Sting), Eastman (Zodiac models) and Evektor (SportStar), failed to register a single ship.  Only Remos tallied...one.  It registered 32 in 2009!  What’s happening here? 
Eastman is working on a comeback after several fatal crashes and a subsequent airframe redesign, but the other four produce a variety of excellent quality aircraft and enjoy good reputations.  Pricing on any of their models is not by and large out of line with the rest of the market.
Thomas goes into the shadows with this:  “It's not that there's no demand: SportCruiser, Cessna, CubCrafters and Flight Design all registered decent numbers of aircraft. Was the owner experience of these other aircraft not so good? Support not there? Wrong features? Parts problems? Airframe failures? Or did the distributor simply bring in too much inventory, register it all at once, and then spend the last 2 years not registering any new ones while steadily selling off the inventory?”
All are reasonable inquiries.  I’m particularly drawn to his support and inventory sell-off conjectures.  Airframe failures have been at a minimum.  Owner experience is difficult to gauge: what one person tells a private buddy may never reach many public ears, rumor mongers though we pilots tend to be.
It’s hard to see a clear picture for four of those five companies not tallying.  It’s worth some digging; I’ll have Dr. Watson and my magnifying glass at the ready at Oshkosh, which starts in just three days!

Brain damage in sport

The problem with ethics is that there is always a gap between what is the case (according to evidence) and what ought to be done about it.

As such, readers might be interested in a news story about former NFL player Dave Duerson who requested his brain be left for medical analysis in his suicide note. If it can be substantially evidenced that certain sports have a high likelihood of significant brain damage, then does it mean that such sports should be banned or drastically altered to reduce this likelihood?

Equally interesting, former Olympic Gold medalist James Cracknell has made a video about the importance of wearing cycling helmets after he suffered brain injury whilst cycling in Arizona. In it, he states that he is no longer James Cracknell as the accident altered his personality but implies that despite this is, this new existence is still preferable to death. Some obvious philosophical questions arise here about identity: if James Cracknell says he is no longer James Cracknell, then who is he? And would that mean that James Cracknell is the equivalent of dead anyway? In which case, wouldn't that undermine his point about the wearing of a cycle helmet?

Another Roadable Aircraft Project!

Okay, so no way this is ever going to be a Light Sport aircraft, but this is just too much fun and I had to pass it along.

Famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan has been at it again, this time with his eclectic take on a flying car that began life as an electric-powered flying testbed.  

BiPod lifts off (sans props) for initial test flights.  All images courtesy Aviation Week & Space Technology

Aviation Week's online blog (also picked up by Wired magazine) shared information released exclusively to it by Rutan's Scaled Composites company known in recent years for many fantastic projects including Spaceship One and White Knight.  

Called BiPod, the flying car became a crash program, completed in just four months and already in test flight mode.  Rutan himself retired in April of this year.

Model 367 BiPod is characteristically, wonderfully unconventional as have been all of Rutan's many designs.

The two-seat, hybrid-electric "roadable" aircraft (mini-rant: I sure hope that term doesn't replace flying car, which flows off the tongue much more agreeably, don't you think?), originally conceived as a fast, inexpensive electric aircraft, morphed into a flying car.  The program was hurried along, says Aviation Week, to allow Rutan to shepherd it through to completion before he hung up his cad cam computer's mouse.  He was in the shop cutting, fabricating and sanding many nights long after the rest of the team went home. 

First "flight" was last March 30.  The unusual-looking carplane has made several short hops at Scaled's Mojave, California airport location.  

And the hops were just that: speed, built up from battery-powered driving wheels, was translated into short glides above the runway.  Fun stuff!

The fully operational BiPod will carry two 450cc gas engines, one per fuselage, which will drive generators feeding an electric power system.  In land mode, the system will drive motors in the driving wheels at the aft location of each fuselage pod.  The forward wheels are steerable.

During flight, the power grid will drive four 15kW motor-driven props: one on each nose, two on the horizontal stabilizer.

Good old Burt: you can never count out his sheer design originality.

Lithium batteries fill the nose of both pods.  They are inflight-rechargeable and will augment takeoff power from the two engines.  

The Scaled Composites crew.  Burt Rutan is seen 4th from left

Think of the advantages for driving with disagreeable companions (mothers-in-law?) too.  They can ride in the right hand pod, leaving the driver in the left pod, in blissful silence.

Interestingly, only the throttle is common to both...cockpits?  Car interiors?  Carpits?  Your choice: driving is exclusively from the left pod, and flying is done from the right.  Hmmm...that means mischief could still be done from the other pod by a cranky passenger. 

Span is almost 32 feet.  Wings detach for driving.  Cruise speed in flight: 200mph with max range of 750 miles at 100 mph.

Driving, BiPod can go at freeway speeds for 820 miles on a tank of gas or 35 miles on batteries alone.

It'll be fascinating to watch what happens with this project.  It's a bit challenging to imagine this project ever coming to the market.  Taking a road trip with the fam separated into two compartments seems strange...although anyone with surly teenagers (or those poor, traditionally maligned mothers-in-law) will easily see some potential benefits.

Europe Approves ASTM Standard - kinda

FAA's European doppelganger is EASA ( European Aviation Safety Agency), a governmental body which has wrestled with how to "regulate the new kid" for some time.
And EASA has at last come out with its much-anticipated CS-LSA, or Certification Specification for Light-Sport Aircraft.
American makers have eagerly awaited the announcement so they could at least consider how they might better compete with the many LSA producers overseas that have dominated our domestic market (roughly 2 out of every 3 LSA sold here come from offshore).
Although CS-LSA, as industry insider Dan Johnson reports, is "not exactly what the industry hoped for, it at least represents acceptance of the ASTM certification standards."
The benefit extends to all manufacturers foreign and domestic, since uncertainty over whether LSA aircraft produced for America, under the ASTM certification, would ever be legal to sell in Europe has been a stumbling block for Yankee sellers since the creation of LSA here in 2004.
Light sport aircraft in Europe, known as ultralights and microlights, was already a thriving industry over there, and contributed to their acceptance here even as American makers scrambled to create, refine, upgrade and promote their own Light Sport designs.

Working against everybody for some time has been the market's Perfect Storm trifecta :
1.  A high Dollar/Euro exchange rate (currently $1.41 per €1) which imposed high prices for all European-made LSA sold in this country
2. The Economy, duh.
3.  The higher-than-anticipated cost of LSA from all makers foreign and domestic.
Perhaps the biggest impact of CS-LSA on American companies will be that they can finally sell their ASTM-certified aircraft overseas.  And the high Dollar to Euro exchange rate means American aircraft would be attractively priced to Europeans: they get an effective 30% discount.  A U.S. aircraft priced at $90,000 would cost €60,000 over thar.
But knocking that in the head is the nature of the CS-LSA spec itself, which incorporates many expenses not incurred in certifying aircraft to the ASTM spec in America.
CS-LSA provides, as LAMA Europe's head Jan Fridrich points out in Dan's blurb on this topic, "merely another airworthiness code, which a manufacturer can choose in lieu of full EASA Type Certification." That's as in millions-of-dollars full.
Say whuh?  He means even under CS-LSA, any manufacturer must still get DOA (Design Organization Approval) and POA (Production Organization Approval) from EASA to produce aircraft for sale under under the new category.  Which still means a significant cash outlay above and beyond typical ASTM certification costs that could run into hundreds of thousands of bucks for each model.  Why?  EASA charges fees for those standards.  In our country, FAA's oversight is funded by, yep, you and me, the taxpayers.  Although the current debt reduction free-for-all in Congress might change that here too, who knows where that's going?
On top of all that, EASA also charges annual fees to keep those standards current.
So Mr. Dan speculates this all could mean, if CS-LSA isn't revised more favorably down the road, one of two things:
1. Bigger companies could pay the EASA charges and fold the increase into sales prices.
2. Smaller companies could say, "Nein", throw up their hands and bail out of the entire business, finding the cost of competition too great.
Bottom line: higher prices likely, at least for European-produced LSA.  Americans who choose not to sell overseas might actually improve their appeal cost-wise here, while their EASA-conforming competition ponies up and suffers the need to produce pricier aircraft, even as those smaller European producers drop out of the game.
One ray of hope in all of this lies in LAMA Europe's ongoing push for a more "self-declarative" adjustment to the CS-LSA specification, which would lower or remove those added DOA and POA costs and help many companies choose to stay in business.
Otherwise it could indeed be DOA for several companies who have hung in there all this time hoping to jump into the European market without incurring typical EASA and FAA full certification costs.
Probably the best part of this news is that ASTM, doing well here in the U.S., now has a good foothold overseas, which expands its potential influence on light aircraft production worldwide.

Horses of a Different Color

 I've written about the topic of high-hour pilots and the need for transitioning them into LSA a fair amount now. 
I've also heard about it from and talked to a lot of people about it.  Avemco Insurance, before they took a hiatus from writing new LSA policies a couple months back, wrote a minimum of 5 hours mandatory transition training into their premium contracts with pilots, stipulating, basically, this: "We don't care if you be Sully Sullenburger or Wiley Post incarnate.  If you want us to insure you in your new LSA, you will get five hours flight training in it."

Stumbling around the net the other day, I found this excellent piece written by Ed Downs for In Flight USA, in which he lays out the need, in particular, for veteran pilots to check the uber-confidence at the hangar door and give LSA full respect as unique aircraft with distinct behaviors.
Definitely worth reading if you're at all of the LSA = "little airplanes" persuasion.

eWow! Blockbuster Electric Flight

A crack team of aeronautical whizbrains in the Institute of Aircraft Design at the University of Stuttgart, Germany has just passed its second important milestone in less than two months: its electric aircraft eGenius just flew more than two hours at more than 100 mph.
Not by coincidence, that's exactly the kind of performance that will be required to take $1.3 million top prize in the recently postponed (until September 25) CAFE Green Flight Challenge. 
The GFC will award the prize money to the aircraft that can fly 200 miles at greater than 100 mph on the equivalent of one gallon of gas per occupant.  The per occupant proviso is significant...and EGenius carries two people, so it can use enough batteries to store two gallons worth of energy. 
That's a lot of batteries given the current relative inefficiency of energy storage of batts vs. gas, but it appears that hurdle has been overcome, and rather handily, since there was apparently several minutes of charge left after the record-breaking flight.

The eGenius electric motor - 60kW (80.5 hp equivalent)

The eGenius, funded by Airbus, is an electric motorglider, with the requisite high-aspect wing (55 feet).  It's powered by a 60 kW (80.5 hp) motor, installed in the tail to drive a larger, more efficient prop.  The battery pack can stow 56 kWh of energy.
Flight profile included a climb to 4000 feet and an out-and-back between two nearby towns.  Total distance was 211 miles, a world record for electric flight.
This on the heels of its maiden flight in May.
If the other entries (12 at last count) in September's GFC big-money event aren't shaking in their boots yet...they oughta be.  It's a stunning development and augurs well for advancing the technology by at least one leap and bound...the point of the contest in the first place.

Let me say it again: Wow!

Of Amphibs and Aircars

Two of the best-promoted and most interesting LSA projects - and two of the most delayed getting to market - are back in the news. 

A5 flight testing continues.  * photo courtesy ICON Aircraft

ICON Aircraft, a startup company created to produce the sexy composite A5 amphibian, just snagged  $25 million in funding to help complete remaining design issues, tool up for production and begin cranking out airplanes.
The company reports around 500 A5 orders on the books, at $139,000 per.  A few months of flight testing remain to be completed, along with a new wing (reportedly for better spin resistance and directional stability), which means the production target date has been pushed back again, this time to the last quarter of 2012.
Reported among the new crop of investors are Eric Schmidt of Google, Satyen Patel, formerly of Nike and Phil Condit, former CEO of Boeing, and some "undisclosed" Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.  The initial infusion of greenbacks will be $15 million, with an option for $10 million more.
Meanwhile, on the flying car...er, "roadable aircraft", front, the always press-visible Terrafugia recently got a nod from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration when it granted the company's application for a temporary exemption for its Transition flying car (or driving airplane...oh heck, it's just easier to say flying car).

Concept of revised Transition design.  * photo courtesy Terrafugia

The exemption relaxes four federal vehicle safety standards requirements for the Transition, acknowledging that complying with the standards at this point in the ever-more-costly aircar would impose a condition of substantial economic hardship on the company and also grant more time to find safe alternatives to current automotive safety standards.
Nonetheless, these are temporary exemptions.  And Terrafugia had asked for a longer time period for two of the four exemptions.
The company cited its 500 potential jobs by 2015 as partial justification for requesting the exemptions, and the agency took that into consideration as well as the overall occupant safety factor.   One selling point was Terrafugia's contention that the Transition increases pilot safety, since it can land at any airport in worsening VFR conditions and continue to the destination by road.  Boy, those folks know how to articulate every possible benefit out of their concept.
The point here would seem to be that the Transition would reduce potential VFR-into-IMC accidents because pilots wouldn't be tempted to continue flights in bad weather in deterioriating weather.  Of course, that's only common sense for non-IFR pilots, a legal requirement as well, but as we all know, pilots get in trouble this way all the time, with occasional disastrous results.
Exemption periods of one or three years included tire and rim selection requirements, glazing materials (windows and windscreen), occupant crash protection (advanced - and heavy - air bags) and electronic stability control systems.

Finding the middle road between air and ground regulations.   * photo courtesy Terrafugia

 One can appreciate the difficulty of having to comply with not only aircraft but also automobile regulations, each set of which is tough enough to meet for one-medium vehicles.
One teaching point for those inclined to scoff at the need to "bend" the rules: the glazing exemption deals with the potential safety hazard that traditional laminated car safety glass presents to pilots when shattered...it can cobweb something fierce.  Imagine you get a bird strike front and center on final approach and can't see forward.  You could pull a Lindbergh and look out the side window, but you get the point.
Significant weight penalty from auto glass is another consideration, so the exemption allows for time to develop polycarbonate materials with comparable protection for the occupants, at less weight, while still resisting shattering or crazing.
The many design and regulatory challenges have again postponed flight testing of the 2nd, redesigned Transition prototype (the first, which flew briefly, had a canard), until at least March of 2012.