On Thursday, March 8, 2018 at 6:03:02 PM UTC-7, son_of_flubber wrote:
This looks to be a remanufactured 2-33. I picture this:

They added up the cost of materials, hangar rent, utilities, insurance, and kept track of hours of labor spent. The supervised unskilled labor hours they charged at minimum wage. The skilled labor hours they charged at the prevailing rate. Add 5% a year for their 'cost of money', 5% for their trouble and they get an asking price of $75K. $75K +/- is what a remanufactured 2-33 costs.

This true cost of a remanufactured 2-33 tells me that a long term commitment to 2-33s is throwing good money after bad. You can remanufacture a 2-33 piecemeal, spread out of years, or all at once. Maintaining these birds only makes sense in the long run, when and where people donate hours and hours of their time. Sure that still happens and having trained in 2-33s, I'm grateful and appreciative of their generosity, but the people who have that amount of disposable time are ageing out. Most dads and moms nowadays want to spend their 'time off' with their kids and spouses, not in a hangar covered in dust. And speaking as a recently retired person myself, I have better things to do with my time. (In my defense, I've ponied up money to buy two semi-modern trainers for my club, and I volunteer time at my club.)

Now assuming you find people to donate the time to keep your 2-33 airworthy and cosmetically attractive, what do you get from a student's perspective? How much does a minute in the air cost in a 2-33 compare to a minute in the air in a semi-modern trainer like a ASK 21 or PW-6?

The 32:1 glide ratio is a tipping point. If there is lift to be found, a student can stay up for an hour (and learn to soar) in a 32:1 glider that has decent penetration. They can even fly downwind of the airport! Wow. Who knew?

In a 2-33... they had better find lift under the first cloud that they try. More often than not, they need to buy 2-3 tows to get an hour of practice in the air. On the plus side they get more practice at landing, but we all know that 'gaining altitude in lift' is the heroin that hooks us on the sport. If you want to reduce student attrition during training, put them in a ASK-21 or a PW-6.

If you're wanting a stream of students to subsidize club cash flow by buying lots and lots of tows, a 2-33 does a much better job at that than a 32:1 glider.

Back on 7/17/97, Jean Richard shared this on RAS. Perhaps the $35,000 AMOC plus restoration of L-13's to 0 hours is not so crazy, eh?


Switching from 2-33 to BlanÃ*k
A positive experience for instructors and students

Four years ago, we started doing ab initio instruction on BlanÃ*k L-13 and
put our venerable 2-33 on sale. It was a quite positive experience and nobody
in the club really miss the venerable red and white flying stone.

After four years, we observe the following points :

- average duration of instruction flight increase by 50 % due to the better
performances of the BlanÃ*k

- students progress faster to the licence due to longer flights and less time
consuming in ups and downs when it's not necessary

- towing times are slightly better since L-13 has the same weight as 2-33
but significantly less drag at towing speed and also because we can use higher
tow speed close to the best rate of climb of our tugplane (we are towing the
BlanÃ*k 8 knot faster than the 2-33, this last one becoming unsafe at speed
above 55 knots - out of trim with a pitch up tendancy)

- higher tow speed means cooler engine and faster descent and at the end,
significant saving on engine overhaul

- myth about the fragile BlanÃ*k against the rought 2-33 brought instructors to be
more demanding to students and the instruction quality improved ; hard landing
were a lot more frequent in the 2-33's days that they are now (the only hard
landing I saw for the last four years were with the Puchacz, in the hand of more
experiemented pilots, and not with students in BlanÃ*k)

- we practice hidden panel flights (no instrument at all) with students and consider
it as a very interesting part of the training ; it was not possible (legally) with the
single panel 2-33

- solo on the Grob Astir Club is requiered before licence (would you give a motor
car driver licence to somebody who just drove horse car ?) ; average students
can do it a lot faster than when we were doing training on 2-33, due to BlanÃ*k
handling closier to modern planes than 2-33

- many people apprehended much higher maintenance cost with the BlanÃ*k ; it
proved to be wrong : using BlanÃ*k for ab initio instruction didn't increase
significantly maintenance costs and those are not significantly higher than with
2-33

- due to lower landing/hour ratio, the flying hour is less expansive with the BlanÃ*k
than with the 2-33 (with aerotow operation)

- due to the same reason as above, the average flying time/day is higher with the
BlanÃ*k than with the 2-33

Now, don't ask me why nobody miss the 2-33 after the last four year experience.
And don't ask me why some neighbour clubs put their 2-22/2-33 on sale just after
us.
And the trend of the last 12 years (membership going down year after year,
without an exception) is thing of the past. Membership is finally increasing.

J. Richard