"Almarz" wrote in message
news
On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 03:39:37 GMT, "C Kingsbury"

Pigs will fly first. As others have mentioned that amount of money will
barely buy you a car, and they are working off of astounding economies of
scale.

How much are those pigs expected to be selling for? Any avionics
included?


$15-25K right now gets you a box full of tubes, cables, nylon fabric, a
lawnmower engine, and a photocopied book titled "Build Your Own Ultralight."
Under part 103 none of this is certified and it's pretty simple to
manufacture (just cut a bunch of tubes, cable, fabric, and bag up some
hardware) so there's not much fat left to cut on prices.

Look at boats if you prefer. Here's a 21' fiberglass molded boat with a
3-cylinder engine. No fancy instruments, pretty basic:
http://www.yamaha-motor.com/products...amaha_lx210_.a
spx

$22,000 MSRP, trailer not included. Guess what? Yamaha will probably build
more of these next month than the entire LSA industry will make in the next
two or three years. They can spread the R&D costs of the engine across god
knows how many product lines.

What will it take for a LSA to hit at this price level? Volume, volume,
volume. And it isn't going to happen that way. Up and down the East coast
every nook and cranny of every river and bay is filled with marinas. There
are 16 million registered recreational boats, and that number doesn't
include canoes, hobie cats, etc. Sport Aviation has a long way to go before
it can even bark at these numbers let alone exhibit similar economies of
scale.

Don't get me wrong. I'm excited about the whole light-sport concept and
could easily see myself taking part in it someday, even though I'm a
part-owner of a 172 and instrument-rated and thus fully-invested in the
"traditional" way of doing things.

The best parts of this are the reduced certification requirements for
aircraft and mechanics. A lot of pilots would and will go through a 120-hour
course to get a full repairman's certificate and another 16 hours to get the
inspector rating. A traditional A&P is an 18-month full-time program and
that works only for the idle rich and people who actually want to work as a
mechanic. All of these things augur well for much lower ownership costs,
which are the real kicker to owning and operating an airplane. $50-100k to
buy a plane is nothing big when you amortize it over ten or twenty years.

-cwk.