High Cost of Sportplanes

Along the lines of my previous posting regarding the theoretical base
price of any LSA plane produced commercially, I've provided the
following numbers for comparison. Note that the single biggest cost is
labor ( even at the ridiculously low rate I specified):

Airframe + avionics + engine + labor
kit basic O235
20000 + 4000 + 15000 + ( 500 * 45 ) = 61500

Note that labor costs 22500 and that the above number doesn't specify
any profit or liability insurance. Adding these two in easily puts the
base price over $80.00.

Of particular note, if the quantity of labor could be reduced by half on
both the production of the airframe parts and assembly, you might
conceivably squeeze out 20K from the base price. I'm not sure if your
average LSA/kit manufacturer is up to the task of tackling all the
required process/materials/FEA engineering necessary to realise those
savings, but I have a feeling a community effort might succeed if the
information were pooled.

I've seen other kit manufacturers attempt to recover these costs the
easy way over the last few years by moving operations to places such as
south america or south east asia. This however, seems to me to be a
short sighted way to recover assembly costs, particularly with the costs
of oil these days. If only these manufacturers would spend the money
they are going to spend on moving operations off shore on better
engineered products, then not only would we have better airplanes, but
they would be made at home.

Evan Carew