High Cost of Sportplanes

Patrick,

If the average small plane manufacturer allocated 500 hours of labor to
finish an airplane's metal work at $45.00 / hr, then that works out to
22,000+ bucks / airframe. Over 10 aircraft, that amounts to $220,000.
Suddenly that piece of CNC tooling is starting to look like a bargain
isn't it?

Evan

W P Dixon wrote:
Dang,
Let me know the metalworking equipment you are paying 250,000 bucks for.
A decent brake is around 4000, a nice shear 4000-5000. Yes you could
spend some more, or if you were frugile alittle less. To build something
like a Cub or Champ you don't need 250,000 bucks of metal working
equipment. However if you want to spend that kind of money in your
metalshop I'd love to come work for you I guess if you really wanted
to splurge you could spend some bucks on things like water jet cutters
or what have you..but they could not pay for themselves unless you were
selling airplanes like hotcakes. So really something like that is
something you buy when you know you have the biz going strong, and not
really a start up cost.
Some places I worked had shrinkers /stretchers, and a English Wheel
was a luxury. Of course working on airliners they definitely had CNC and
such to cut parts from...but that is not a sport plane A metal sport
plane can be built very very well with basic sheet metal tools. The high
dollar stuff would be a waste of money unless you needed production
speed of an automobile assembly line.
I've never built a plastic injection mold, but I've built airplanes

Patrick
student SP
aircraft structural mech

Jim,

You're right about the troll-like tone of Christley's attack post.

A little background: He's miffed at me because of some past threads where he
didn't appreciate being corrected on some technical points.

Also thanks for pointing out the importance of editorial integrity in
enthusiast magazines. The vast majority of these magazines are nothing but
shills for industry, with the car magazines being the worst.

I buy most of the aviation rags -- but mostly for the entertainment value
and the pictures. There is very little real info to be had in any of them,
with the notable exception of Peter Garrison in Flying who has always
provided very insightful writing. Full props to Dick Collins too, who is
probably the most weather-knowledgable guy out there and can really talk
common sense when it comes to safety.

The most readable and honest aviation journalist I have ever read is John
Deakin who used to write a column for AVweb, but has been on a hiatus
lately. Here is a great storyteller with all kinds of flying adventures from
a long and colorful career. He is one of the most well-rounded pilots you
will ever come across with terrific insight into all aspects of airmanship
and a great technical knowledge of the mechanical side of aircraft as well.
A real airman in the classic sense of the word and a great writer too.

Mike Busch is also an honest and very readable writer and can also be found
on AVweb. For anyone who hasn't discovered these guys yet, go to AVweb and
read every one of their back columns. Yuu will get more real honest info
than reading the newstand aviation magazines for a hundred years.

Regards,

Gordon.



"Jimbob" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 18 Sep 2005 05:44:24 GMT, Ernest Christley
wrote:

This is the tragi-comic state of "journalism" in the enthusiast magazine
sector. The bottom line is that the reader counts for zero, while the
advertiser is king. And issues like safety and price-gouging are swept
under
the carpet by editorial apologists.


Bzzt! Wrong. The reader accounts for about $4.50 per magazine. That
just barely will cover the cost of printing...maybe. The major revenue,
the money that will keep the lights on, comes from....you guessed
it...the advertisers!!! And guess, what...I don't give money to people
who say bad things about me. And I don't ask that from others. You
could have kept Flying honest if you were willing to open your
checkbook. But of course, as is all to typical now days, you expect
others to sacrifice to coddle you.

This is bordering on troll territotory, but I will bite.

I think he expects what everyone else expects. An honest review.
Anything less than that is just marketing. I have a susbscrition to
Flying, but I'll be damned if I am going to buy the magazine if it's
just a schill for the aviation comanpies.

There are plenty of "Marketing" mags out there for many industries.
All they are is marketing slicks and maybe an occasional fluff
article. They beg you to get a free subscribtion so their demos are
better and advertising revenue goes up. That not what I expect from
Flying. If I pay, I expect information.

The thing you forget about in you money equaiton. Advertising pays
the bills, but without subscribers, their advertising doesn't bring in
squat.

I used to subscribe to a SCUBA magazine that was pretty good in the
past, but then it really started regurgitating the marketing slicks
that the regulator companies produced. So I stopped subscribing.
They didn't miss me perhaps but that rag is known in the industry as a
hack magazine and I think that the only people that subscribe are
newbies that don't know any better. Their revenue is currently
suffereing.



Want a magazine that tells the truth and isn't worried about advertisers
(cause they don't have any), the subscribe to "Consumer Reports".


Good magazine. Doesn't have a lot to do with aviation.


Maybe you can be that enterprising individual that is so much smarter
than all the guys-n-gals that are giving it their all, Gordon.
Personally, I've been building my Delta for over 3yrs now, in conditions
not far removed from the Allegro's that are being put together down in
Sanford. If I was expecting to feed and house my family from building
airplanes, I'd have to look at $100K as fairly minimal.

Hope your plane turns out well.

And I would expect that most of your equipment is idle while you are
working on one particular part. This is called inefficiency of
production. I'm betting Allegro is using an assembly line concept
that is a little more efficient with their resources.

If not, than that's the problem.


Furthermore, sportsplanes will be a marginal part of the aviation scene,
even if the planes were available for $25k. You don't make any money
with a light plane. They can't even be used as a serious mode of
transportation with most pilots, because the weather can rise up at any
time and destroy the best laid plans. Very few people could even use
one to get to work. They are toys, and they will always be toys until
someone finds a way to make money with them other than building and
selling them or giving flight training. That keeps the market volume
low, which drives the price up.

Agreed, but even toys have to reasonably priced.

So, get over the price-gouging bull, until your ready to introduce the
Arnaut CloudWunker costing less than an average family sedan. If you
don't like the prices of the products of offering to you, don't buy it.


He isn't buying. That's the point.

Jim

http://www.unconventional-wisdom.org

Well,
Considering most production aircraft workers make from 10 to 15 bucks an
hour I don't see how you come up with 45 an hour. That makes a difference to
doesn't it ? I loved working production but you just made alot more
contracting,...so that's what I ending up doing. I made a whopping 12 an
hour building Gulfstream's, and as a team leader for McDonnell-Douglas I
made 17.65 an hour...most of my workers at McDonnell-Douglas made 9.99 an
hour to start. But they ranged in pay from 9.99 to around 15.00, according
to their experience and years at the company. Yes at McDonnell-Douglas we
had some great benefits....but a company just starting out will not be able
to deliver these until it is making money. And well it pretty much ended up
sealing Douglas's fate .
No company can make it if it's labor force costs more than it's profit.
If you would like to pay production workers 45 an hour I am sure you will
have some very experienced workers knocking the door down to come work for
you..but you will fold very quickly.
One must also consider the amount of manpower. Where 20 people built a
rear spar on the C-17 in 10 days....20 people building a light sport plane
would be all in each others way. Being as a start up operation may be
building one or two planes, the amount of employees would not be great.
Building small planes such as these really makes less employees
better...production workers work very fast and very efficient when they do
not step all over each other.
Of course a big key is to weed out non-preformers and slackers. Having a
good Assembly Outline is very important to the contruction process, and one
could hire a professional aviation planner to do this...or one could rely on
a very experience leadman to do it as well. Myself I would let a leadman
take time in his duties to do this. Most planners don't know a thing about
tools and how long something really takes until they are told by someone.
Most leadmen can tell you from the start a very good estimate of time
required.
To sum up there are lots of ways to save money in a start up operation
and there are alot of ways to have yourself in bankruptcy before you even
start. As my Daddy used to say, "Only a Grave digger starts at the top!" M-D
built 3.5 Md-80's a week when I was on that line...imagine the speed a well
experienced crew could build one these designs....Ultracruiser Plus,
thatcher CX4, Sonex. Yep there were thousands of people on the MD-80 line,
and all those people would not be needed on a small aircraft line.
So you are correct in labor can be a big cost..but you are way off on
how much I got paid

Patrick
student SPL
aircraft structural mech

"Evan Carew" wrote in message
...
Patrick,

If the average small plane manufacturer allocated 500 hours of labor to
finish an airplane's metal work at $45.00 / hr, then that works out to
22,000+ bucks / airframe. Over 10 aircraft, that amounts to $220,000.
Suddenly that piece of CNC tooling is starting to look like a bargain
isn't it?

Evan

W P Dixon wrote:
Dang,
Let me know the metalworking equipment you are paying 250,000 bucks for.
A decent brake is around 4000, a nice shear 4000-5000. Yes you could
spend some more, or if you were frugile alittle less. To build something
like a Cub or Champ you don't need 250,000 bucks of metal working
equipment. However if you want to spend that kind of money in your
metalshop I'd love to come work for you I guess if you really wanted to
splurge you could spend some bucks on things like water jet cutters or
what have you..but they could not pay for themselves unless you were
selling airplanes like hotcakes. So really something like that is
something you buy when you know you have the biz going strong, and not
really a start up cost.
Some places I worked had shrinkers /stretchers, and a English Wheel
was a luxury. Of course working on airliners they definitely had CNC and
such to cut parts from...but that is not a sport plane A metal sport
plane can be built very very well with basic sheet metal tools. The high
dollar stuff would be a waste of money unless you needed production speed
of an automobile assembly line.
I've never built a plastic injection mold, but I've built airplanes

Patrick
student SP
aircraft structural mech

Evan Carew wrote:

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.

It may well be short sighted, but have you looked at the labels on any of
your recent purchases? I recently read an essay by G.K. Chesterton where he
questions the advisability of exploiting the cheap labor in the Far East;
the book I was reading was rather fragile, since it was published in 1912.
He, too, considered it short sighted.



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In article ,
Richard Riley wrote:


How many pilots are there?

About 600,000 in the US.

How are you going to sell 1 million airplanes a year at any price?



How many drivers were there when Henry started building cars? My
contention, stated clearly in previous posts, is that price attracts
volume. The AOPA's Young Eagles program is designed to attract young
people to the world of flying. Given the current costs of airplanes,
unless the program combines a trust fund with the intro flight, it isn't
going to do much good.

I do admit that learning to fly is challenging and takes dedication and
commitment, not to mention a significant outlay of money. And I agree
with others who speculated that we may not really want to share the
skies with people of the average driver caliber.

So what if it isn't a million? What if it's 50,000 new airplanes a year
from one cost-conscious manufacturer? I think that's a palatable number,
and one that could pay for the cost of tooling for efficiency. I've
watched the evolution of CNC machines over the years, and you can get
some pretty sophisticated stuff these days for pocket change.

The company that won the WW2-era design contest for the military vehicle
that became known as the jeep didn't even have an engineer on staff.
They farmed out the engineering work. I bet they changed their own light
bulbs, emptied their own wastebaskets, and took turns cleaning the
toilet at the end of the day, too.

The trouble with many companies today is that they're obnoxiously,
arrogantly, and foolishly top-heavy. I've got a friend working in a
Fortune 500 company that did pretty well until they got bought out by a
bureaucratic monster company. Now when sales get tight and money gets
short, they fire three line workers who are actually producing product,
and use the money to hire another six-figure analyst to try to figure
out what's going wrong. That's only one of a hundred stories I've
accumulated about the stupidity of American manufacturers.

What was that efficiency expert's name who went to Japan after the Big
War to teach Japanese companies how to make quality products at
reasonable prices? He went there because the Americans were too arrogant
to think they needed him.

"Smitty Two" wrote in message
news
In article ,
"Kyle Boatright" wrote:

snip

The Model T sold because Henry Ford made it affordable, and sold it. No
one was driving around in a horse and buggy saying, "jeez, I sure wish
someone would invent a car." The T wasn't exactly a Toyota Avalon,
either. You actually had to get dirty and maintain and fix the damn
thing on a regular basis. The roads sucked. The whole automobile
infrastructure hadn't been built. There weren't a bunch of gas stations,
and Sears stores weren't selling tires and Die Hards. I'd say the T was
more of a novelty toy than "practical transportation" when it was
introduced.

Still he sold a half million $400 cars per year at a time when his
laborers were earning $2.50/day, and the US population was only
100,000,000.


The model T sold because it was a better solution than the horse and buggy.
Have you ver worked around horses? They are fragile animals that take a lot
of maintenance and upkeep. You have to feed, water, shoe, and clean up after
them even if you're not going to need them for days, weeks, or months at a
time. You can park a Model T for months at a time, and it will be ready to
go as long as there is fuel in the tank. On the time spent vs
transportation value realized, the -T was a huge improvement over beasts of
burden.

The market for basic transportation is fixed - EVERYONE needs it. Henry Ford
had that in his favor. LSA manufacturers don't, because LSA's are toys
(more or less), not transportation.

KB

"W P Dixon" wrote in message
...
Well,
Considering most production aircraft workers make from 10 to 15 bucks an
hour I don't see how you come up with 45 an hour. That makes a difference
to doesn't it ? I loved working production but you just made alot more
contracting,...so that's what I ending up doing. I made a whopping 12 an
hour building Gulfstream's, and as a team leader for McDonnell-Douglas I
made 17.65 an hour...most of my workers at McDonnell-Douglas made 9.99 an
hour to start. But they ranged in pay from 9.99 to around 15.00, according
to their experience and years at the company. Yes at McDonnell-Douglas we
had some great benefits....but a company just starting out will not be
able to deliver these until it is making money. And well it pretty much
ended up sealing Douglas's fate .

$45 an hour is probably a realistic cost once you consider that it costs
money to put a building over the worker's head, pay for lights, pay for
tools, pay for supervision, pay to heat/cool the building, etc. For
reference, what shop rate do you pay when someone works on your car? Here
in the Atlanta 'burbs, I pay $60 or so (IIRC) at the local Honda Dealer. The
independant guy charges about $50/hr. I'd say both of these are comparable
rates to the $45/hr mentioned for labor in the previous post.

KB

Smitty Two wrote:
In article ,
Richard Riley wrote:

How many pilots are there?

About 600,000 in the US.


How many drivers were there when Henry started building cars? My
contention, stated clearly in previous posts, is that price attracts
volume. The AOPA's Young Eagles program is designed to attract young

Quick correction, Young Eagles is an EAA program.

So what if it isn't a million? What if it's 50,000 new airplanes a year

There are just over 200,000 aircraft registered in the US, just under
150,000 of them are "piston single engine" (source: AOPA website
http://www.aopa.org/special/newsroom.../aircraft.html ). By the
way, about 20,000 are "experimental."

You're thinking growth, and I would very much like to see this market
segment grow, but look at the current stats. The 20,000 experimental
aircraft is a ballpark indication of the size of the current LSA
market _over the next several years combined_. Even with radical
growth driven brilliant marketing and great products, it will still
be a small market for several years.

Here is a problem no one has brought up yet in the automobile/
airplane analogy: Cars are usually replaced before they are about ten
years old. Light airplanes usually last much longer, so the
replacement cycle doesn't exist in the same way.

What was that efficiency expert's name who went to Japan after the Big
War to teach Japanese companies how to make quality products at
reasonable prices? He went there because the Americans were too arrogant
to think they needed him.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming.

I think everyone here is on the same page, that we'd like to see some
vision in the sportplane industry make it grow, but I think that is
still at least a few years away.

Gordon, I'm gonna have to take out an AOL account because this is a
"met too" post

Right there with you about auto magazines. Fun to read, but they are
primarily marketing (Motor Trend is the worst, some of their picks
for Car of the Year turned out to be the worst lemons- Chevy Vega,
Renault Alliance...). I enjoy the same authors you do- Garrison,
Collins, Deakin- for the same reason- substance. The same reason I
sift through the entertainment, flame wars, and occasional troll on
this group, because there's real substance to be found.

Kyle Boatright wrote:

"W P Dixon" wrote in message
...

Well,
Considering most production aircraft workers make from 10 to 15 bucks an
hour I don't see how you come up with 45 an hour. That makes a difference
to doesn't it ? I loved working production but you just made alot more
snip

$45 an hour is probably a realistic cost once you consider that it costs
money to put a building over the worker's head, pay for lights, pay for
tools, pay for supervision, pay to heat/cool the building, etc. For
reference, what shop rate do you pay when someone works on your car? Here
in the Atlanta 'burbs, I pay $60 or so (IIRC) at the local Honda Dealer. The
independant guy charges about $50/hr. I'd say both of these are comparable
rates to the $45/hr mentioned for labor in the previous post.

Heheh, $60/hr shop rate to get a car fixed actually sounds reasonable
to me.

Like KA/karel said in the other reply, around half of the cost of
labor ends up on the paycheck.

If you want _good_ workers (this is aircraft production after all,
you don't take a wrecked airplane back for exchange like a
hamburger), they'll deserve benefits. They'll also need some
training and supervision (both of which will tie up experienced
labor), overhead like management, payroll/HR, taxes. When they get
experience and turn out to be good workers, they'll deserve pay
raises. Also, a disproportionate effort is always expended picking
up the slack for the bad workers. I agree with $45 as an approximation.

$10-15 an hour seems very low. I'm curious where you get this
figure. It sounds like a starting wage advertised in the jobs
section in the newspaper... I could be wrong though.