Brad wrote:
Yes, like the Apis-E or the Silent-2.
Any insights into the business aspects?

Just small ones from hanging around the Windward Performance folks a few
times a year.

You need a manufacturing facility large enough to hold all the tooling,
planes, and parts in progress, office, and material storage. If you do
all the work in-house, then you a paint booth, wing-sized autoclave, and
canopy oven and the space to put the things. Space costs money, and
heating or cooling the space may not be cheap.

Workers are most efficient if they can work full-time instead of a few
days on - a few days off, and if they can build several wings,
fuselages, etc at a time, instead one glider at a time. This means a
well-designed work flow, maybe some duplicated tooling, and a decent
order backlog.

Finding skilled workers isn't easy unless you are near a place that
already uses them (like Lancair for Windward Performance), and keeping
them isn't easy if you can't keep them busy and paid well. Similar to
the efficiency issue.

Glider pilots are a conservative sort, so getting them to buy a glider
from a new company can be a long, slow process. While you are waiting
for that order backlog to build up, you have to pay for the space, the
materials, the workers.

At some point, you have to figure out what to charge for the glider, and
that's a real headache because you aren't sure of the number of orders,
so you don't know what volume of materials and parts you'll be order, so
you don't know what the costs will be.

Volume is the big issue: anything you want to buy, whether it's fiber,
resin, laser cut parts, even plain old acetone, is cheaper if you buy a
lot of it, but that takes money up front and storage space.

The material prices can rise unexpectedly, whether it's carbon fiber,
resin, paint ($300+ a gallon for some types), or even that acetone.

And, you need some office help to do the accounting, ordering supplies
and making sure they show up on time (and finding alternate sources when
original ones can't deliver), the gofer to run around getting the
inevitable bits and pieces, replacing broken tools, and another gofer to
handle transportation if painting or other tasks are done elsewhere.
There's a lot of the "one damn thing after another" kind of problems.

Somebody has to talk to prospective customers, which can be very time
consuming, and make the sales (you hope that person is really busy). Oh
yeah, advertising, and showing up at the convention with your glider, a
6000 mile round trip at times.

If you have a lot of money to begin with, it's a lot easier to manage,
of course. Then you just have to worry about making a small fortune in
aviation by starting with a big one.

If I wanted to go into the business, I'd try talk to everyone that had
done it that I could find. Not just people like Greg Cole and George
Applebay that have actually started up glider companies, but people in
the small volume airplane field, and even the aircraft kit business. You
might already know a glider pilot that does that!

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly

"Transponders in Sailplanes" on the Soaring Safety Foundation website
www.soaringsafety.org/prevention/articles.html

"A Guide to Self-launching Sailplane Operation" at www.motorglider.org