Fix the high cost [Was:] High Cost of Sportplanes

Evan Carew wrote:
Smitty,

Ideally, I would like to treat this as a community project where the
community contributes the expertise & labor and benefits from the data.


It comes down to "the tragedy of the commons". You are asking people
to privatize the costs and commonize the profits, the reverse from
human nature and good business.


The biggest problem in sport aviation is the low volume involved. If
you get the volume up the costs will come down a great deal.

Overseas production could offset this somewhat. However, getting
people to build aircraft in most countries, even on an experimental kit
basis, is tough. The list of countries that have job shops you can send
a print to, notated in the English language and dimensioned in US
units, and have a hope in hell of getting a part back more than very
vaguely resembling the print, at total costs significantly cheaper than
in the US, is quite small.

Richard Riley wrote:snip


When the cow's giving birth at 3 AM some freezing winter morning
someone has to go help. If it's the "community" cow and not mine, I
might just stay in bed.

How did cows produce calves before there were humans?

Anyway, there are a lot of aircraft designs that for all intents and
purposes are in the public domain. Their designers have passed on
without a clear trail of inheritance. The FAA has allowed aircraft
built in conformance to these Type Certificates to be issued Standard
Category C of A's.

The cost of R&D of basic light aircraft, in any event is not a deal
breaker if you can get some amortization, as a previous poster said.

One necessary step is for the use of a powerplant, also as another
poster said, NOT specific to light aircraft. There simply is not the
volume necessary. An engine built around an existing auto, motorcycle
or similar powerplant WITHOUT the direct involvement of the original
engine manufacturer is pretty much a necessity. If the core engine
manufactuirer has to get involved they will jack the price to Lycoming
levels or worse (PFM).

Section 8,

Interesting use of words there. In my experience, "the tragedy of the
commons" is common jargon for lawyers. I however, work in the computer
science field and am familiar with the Linux OS phenomenon. In that
case, an entire OS & suite of applications was created out of love.
Granted, the cost of such a creation is much lower than for aircraft
structural design, however, I'm guessing that most of us in this news
group have enough tools and materials to put together such reference
structures as we are talking about here.

Evan Carew

Accessory Section 8 wrote:
Evan Carew wrote:

Smitty,

Ideally, I would like to treat this as a community project where the
community contributes the expertise & labor and benefits from the data.



It comes down to "the tragedy of the commons". You are asking people
to privatize the costs and commonize the profits, the reverse from
human nature and good business.

Evan Carew wrote:
Smitty,

Ideally, I would like to treat this as a community project where the
community contributes the expertise & labor and benefits from the data.

Evan

There is on such project already on the way in yahoo groups. You should
be able to find it if you look. Essentially they are collaborating on
the design and the poop is that if you collaborate you get a free set
of the completed plans.
Though that still isn't open source.

Thier contribution requirement doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It
isn't going to keep one of their widows from sueing the rest of them
one one "contributing" member kills themselves doing something stupid.
Their actually making themselves more exposed to liability that way,
not less. They aught to just use code names and release the results
anonymously. In a litigiously insane society, anonymity becomes a
shelter for innovation.

There are in fact a few sets of "documentation" available on the net
gratis. One is a gyro the other is a glider. It has been the request of
one such designer not to use the word "plans" because he is explicitly
not recomending you build one and only use the docs as a point of
study.

I have done a decent amount of reading on the topic of your interest
and am pleased overall at your enthusiasm. There are technical,
financial and political problems that answer the question "why not?",
in regards to building a cheap aircraft. It would take a few pages to
document them all, and you haven't done enough research yourself to
warrant the effort.

Sufficed to say, the technical problems are the small ones. But I
encourage you to continue with your research. Hopefully one day there
will be enough folks to call "bull****" on the current situation and
some change will come of it.

Can I buy an "e"

-Matt

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shrike,

Interesting analysis. As one of the few who gets it, I think you can
appreciate why I chose the open source solution to publishing the data.
Any use of the community data is acceptance of an as-is contract where
any derivative works may not be patented or hoarded as trade secrets.
This also tends to insulate the technology publishers reasonably well
from litigation.

It is important to note that the point of this project is rather narrow.
I am not advocating the development of a specific set of plans for a
completed aircraft structure, but rather a set of procedures to set up a
shop to build such a structure in the cheapest manner. A quick analysis
on my part (followed up by data from other members on this list)
identified labor costs as being the #1 largest cost in pricing an
aircraft structure for sale in the LSA or small GA market. Granted,
there are other issues such as political, high engine prices, high
instrument prices, high materials prices, FBO desirability, etc. that I
am not addressing here, however, one must start somewhere.

Its even worth noting that should labor costs magically go to zero, the
cost of a commercially made aircraft would still probably not go below
50K USD.
Airframe + avionics + engine + labor Insurance Profit Overhead
kit basic 912 Magic
20000 + 4000 + 16000 + ( 0 * 45 ) +10000 + 10000 + 1000 = 61000


As you can see, even getting the largest component down to zero still
doesn't get you an airplane as cheap as an SUV ( for obvious reasons ),
it does however, get you to the point where you can start to compete
with the 69K LSA commercial planes from eastern europe today. At this
point, you are free to start chipping away at the other high price items
like the engine. For instance, an 89hp Jabiru can be had for 11k, thus
saving 5K from the 912 price tag.
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"Evan Carew" wrote:
Its even worth noting that should labor costs magically go
to zero, the cost of a commercially made aircraft would still
probably not go below 50K USD.

Airframe + avionics + engine + labor Insurance Profit
Overhead
kit basic 912 Magic
20000 + 4000 + 16000 + ( 0 * 45 ) +10000 + 10000 + 1000
= 61000


Woah there, overhead of mere $1,000/unit is not possible. At 100
units annually, pretty good if there's many competitors, that will
be only $100K. That's for manufacturing space and equipment,
warranty costs, legal, accounting, information tech, administrative
space, insurance other than product liability, taxes other than
income, phone, utilites, janitorial, etc., etc. And where's your
marketing costs? Advertising, promotional literature and videos,
and say $50K total cost for just one sales guy, who'll be one busy
beaver at 100 annual units. Figure $10K to go to AirVenture; wanna
go to all the others? And gotta demo plane?

Fred F.

Well said. A lot of people on this list have some idea what the
materials cost to build and airplane but they have no idea what it
takes to run a business. A lot of people have accused the LSA
manufacturers of price gouging and getting rich. My experience so far
in this business is that a lot of people are making money off of LSA
manufacturers.

Air show exhibit space sellers, promotional video producers, brochure
designers and printers, magazine advertising departments, logoed
clothing makers and the companies that sell the raw materials and
components for aircraft are the ones making all the money right now.
LSA manufacturers are spending much more than they are making at this
point (it is called investing for those of you in Rio Linda). At some
point, one hopes the income will exceed the outgo. Time will tell.

Rick Pellicciotti
LightSportFlying.com

Evan Carew wrote:
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shrike,

Interesting analysis. As one of the few who gets it, I think you can
appreciate why I chose the open source solution to publishing the data.
Any use of the community data is acceptance of an as-is contract where
any derivative works may not be patented or hoarded as trade secrets.
This also tends to insulate the technology publishers reasonably well
from litigation.

Sometimes the contract is the end of the negotiation. Sometimes it is
the beginning. A hold harmless agreement; though common in end user
licenses; are trounced by safety law. In most states you cannot legally
sign away your own right to safety. Consequently you'll find many
software agreements specically disclaim the use of the software in
situations requiring fault tolerance. For example, MS would really you
rather NOT use Winblows to run say a pacemaker.

So while the open source license protects the right to redistribution
it only marginally protects the authors. In the case of Open
Engineering an aircraft that exposure is amplified.


It is important to note that the point of this project is rather narrow.
I am not advocating the development of a specific set of plans for a
completed aircraft structure, but rather a set of procedures to set up a
shop to build such a structure in the cheapest manner. A quick analysis
on my part (followed up by data from other members on this list)
identified labor costs as being the #1 largest cost in pricing an
aircraft structure for sale in the LSA or small GA market. Granted,
there are other issues such as political, high engine prices, high
instrument prices, high materials prices, FBO desirability, etc. that I
am not addressing here, however, one must start somewhere.


Yes you do have to start somewhere. Try Excel, and reading the
certification requirements in the FARS. (Available online) All the
stuff your talking about will be defined more by the financial model of
the company, than it will by the aircraft selected. The bird has to fit
into the budget, the budget doesn't fit the bird. (Unless your on a
government contract)

To reiterate the aircraft is the _small_ part. And while everybody is
enthusiastic about aircraft technology, very few people have the
patience to sit in front of a spread sheet or a lawbook and fidget
until they understand those issues.

Labor _hours_ can be drastically reduced with modern tooling, there is
no question about that. Whether manufacturing _costs_ can be is a
different issue. You have to figure land labor and capital as a
percentage of projected revenues to be able to tell whether the new
tooling makes sense.

Stop thinking about the plane. Start thinking about the financial model
that supports the project. Then start thinking about the people who
wouldn't want you to succeed and what they would do to prevent you from
succeeding. (The people you would put out of business) That will give
you a picture of the bull you are casually talking about riding. Once
you have that picture ask youself whether you're still interested in
riding it.

This whole thread is really about defining what constitutes "barrier to
entry" in the light aircraft market. There is a whole science involved
in doing what your doing. I think the reason your getting a lot of
attitude is that your talking about financial issues in a engineering
forum. Really you should start addressing your questions to somebody
who understands business finance. You've got the cart before the ox
IMHO.

If your interested in open-sourcing and distributing a free aircraft
design optimized for modern tooling I totally applaud. Then you best
bet is to set up a non-profit to do that (Can be done online for
~$250), and start soliciting help. Once you have one or two designers
and robot guy on board, start soliciting the automotive manufacturers
to lend you an old robot to test your theories. Write a few grant
proposals. They might just give you one to write it off as a donation.
If you associated the project with a University you'd probably get a
lot better response.

You can do it! But right now your barking up the wrong tree. Come back
to this forum when you have questions about the plane, and not about
the financial issues. Right now your just ****ing people off.

-Matt

SNIP

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TaxMan,

As a first step, then, lets agree on some realistic commercial numbers.
From earlier comments, Overhead / plane where 50 & 100 are sold / year
look like:

Airframe + avionics + engine + labor Insurance Profit Overhead
kit basic 912 Magic
20000 + 4000 + 16000 + ( 0 * 45 ) +10000 + 10000 + 1000 = 61000


12000 rent + 50000 sales + 20000 marketing + 10000 general marketing = 92K
Divided over 50 units per year = 1800 / unit
Divided over 100 units per year = ~1000 / unit

I would like however for you to keep in mind that the purpose of this
exercise is to reduce the process cost of a LSA airframe, not to spend
time figuring the minutia of how cheaply to run a company. This
community effort's purpose is to prove a reduced airframe production
cost in the form of a published procedure with estimated costs, not
prove a commercial price. If this overhead cost structure looks even
close to what "sounds good", then I think we should put this issue to
bed. Since we are talking about building reference structures to get an
idea of the direction and cost of a process, then I think we can agree
that the same model should apply to the initial commercial reference
numbers, i.e., all things being equal, if you can take a large chunk off
one or two of the biggest numbers, then you have solved the problem.
Overhead, as you can see, is not one of the biggest numbers.
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shrike,

I'm not trying to attract flames here, but this is exactly an
engineering issue. Other issues having to do with entry into the market
are not part of this discussion. There are already other companies in
this market who could choose to use this technology to reduce their
costs for instance. The point is NOT to define a new viable company with
a new process, but rather to inform those already in the business, or
those just getting started of at least one cheap process. In addition,
since we aren't defining an actual airframe, but rather a process,
liability issues will be minimized.
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