Eurofox vs. Escapade

Smitty Two wrote:
As someone who is very glad, in the end, not to have bought a Kitfox, I
sympathize with your plight and agree with your recommendations, in
theory. But, how would you actually do those things? Are the books of
private companies open for inspection? Are the books of public companies
trustworthy, and do layman know how to interpret them? This is a real
question, not just rhetorical. How *can* we embark an a five year
project with some real assurance that the company will be there all the
way through?

In my case, after considering Skystar for ten years, poring over
literature endlessly, visiting the factory and taking a demo flight, it
came down to this: When I pointed out to them that their "new" website
was positively rife with atrocious writing -- spelling, grammar,
sentence construction, logical flow of ideas, etc. -- they declined to
fix it.

When a company puts out literature and maintains a website, the writing
is all I've got to judge them on. How are they going to write an
instruction manual if they can't construct a sentence in the English
language? First it was awful, then they were complacent about fixing it.
I went somewhere else. Maybe it was just my dumb luck, but then again,
Van's has a great website. It's thorough, well-organized, easy to
navigate, comprehensive, and has a high signal to noise ratio. And
reasonably well written.

It sounds like... you chose wisely. Do you really mean you are glad not
to have bought a Kitfox, or do you mean not to have bought from Skystar?

All good points. You ask, "How do you actually do these things?" Well...

Buyers need to get specific answers to questions that may not even occur
to them. You can start gathering information about a company using the
net. The standard caveats apply about getting many opinions, reading
between the lines (how people answer and what they don't say can mean
something), going to different sources, and realize some of it will be
hearsay or incorrect.

Most airplanes have online builders groups, you don't have to look hard
to find them. The Kitfox community has an excellent email list
(provided by Matronics), it is archived all the way back to when it grew
out of the old Yahoo group (both were/are archived daily). There were
recent first-hand complaints of problems and less than straight
treatment of customers on the archives before I forked over my money
about two years ago. I just never looked.

Lots of builders put their logs online (pictures, comments, and all).

This newsgroup is also an excellent source of quantity and quality of
expertise and opinion. 'Nuff said.

Then there's the old fashioned way of talking to people. Pretty much
every EAA chapter has a website that lists their members and aircraft.
One or two chapters will be within driving distance. The rest
_probably_ have phone or email...

Magazines will always paint a rosy picture, that is their nature.

About company websites, as much as I hate to admit it (I'm a technical
guy at heart), salesmen and first impressions are important. In
contrast to the Skystar website's poor quality, the kits were generally
very well engineered and documented. Yep, puzzling.

A few specific and pointed questions at current builders and flyers may
either solicit a solid, reassuring "no, of course not" response, or a
suspiciously vague response. Ask the company too. If they don't get
defensive or cagey, that's a good sign. So what kind of questions do
prospective customers ask?

Here is a starting point. My biggest contentions with Skystar are/we

It was routine practice for components to be on backorder for months,
although I was never told this until after my kit arrived. Again, there
was talk online of long backorders.

I was promised specific months for production and delivery, only to find
out, during a visit to the factory a few weeks prior to delivery, my kit
(already paid for in full) was sold to another customer without my
approval or notification. Again, at the time there was talk on the
email list of major delays in kit delivery, which since makes me believe
"sold to another customer" was a ruse. Several months later a new
person on the email list was told his kit was mistakenly sold to another
customer. Hmmm. He made a lot of the same mistakes I did.


I could go on. I bet you ask questions like this, you'll get some
valuable answers--positive or negative. Like I said, learn from
mistakes and move on. The smiley face is because no matter what,
I'm building my own airplane.


PS- the guy who accepted my payment, gave me production and delivery
dates, neglected to tell me about backorders, or tell me when it was
apparently sold out from underneath me is a character named Ed Downs.
Let me rephrase that. He told me it was sold when I asked him face to
face, standing in the factory less than a month before my original
delivery date, whereabouts my soon-to-be-delivered kit was. I still
didn't clue in to the big picture for a while after that.

Hope this helps a few people. Run on sentences and all