In article ,
Jim Carriere wrote:

wrote:
A friend is looking at both of these for a prospective kit purchase.

I have a suggestion for your friend that is an answer to a question you
didn't exactly ask, but good advice to anyone about to plunk down money
on a kit.

The single best piece of advice I could have got two years ago when I
was in the "research" stage would have been to look hard, very hard into
each kit company's financial health, customer satisfaction (especially
recent builders), and business practices. This is not meant to be a
statement about either of the kits in question, rather it is about all kits.

I wasn't so shrewd before I got ripped off by the now-bankrupt Skystar.
It took me about an hour at the time to think to myself, "They've sold
a lot of kits, been around a long time, that's good enough for me."

Hey, we all make mistakes, hopefully others can learn from them and then
you move on

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.