Editorial

My wife informs me that, right on schedule, I have become my father, having entered the rail-at-the-idiots-on-television phase of middle age. And there is so much to rail at. Specifically, two reports that ran nearly back to back last month. One quoted a middle-aged woman angry that she had to pay $100 to fill up her Lincoln Navigator. (My rail: “And you bought that car why?) The second report was a roundtable of talking heads bemoaning the fact that George Bush couldnt convince the Saudis to increase oil production to stave off $4 gas. (My rail: “Did it ever occur to you morons to drive something that would allow you to barely notice $4 gas?”)

If youre a true believer in the VLJ revolution, your world got rocked in early February with the announcement that Adam Aircraft, a promising and early contender in the market, folded up. From the warm comfort of hindsight, Id like to say we told you so, but no such claim will be forthcoming. As much as its possible to predict these things, we thought Adams business plan was realistic, its funding relatively assured and the aircraft-the 500 piston twin and the 700 twin jet-were good designs well-suited for the market. True, the piston twin market is iffy, but VLJ demand is supposed to be the great fertile ground of the 21st century.

Let me make you president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for a moment and place you in Cessnas boardroom at the opposite end of a 60-foot mahogany conference table from Jack Pelton. Youve just heard a team of MBAs explain how manufacturing the new Skycatcher LSA in China will reduce the cost of goods by $70,000. Your job is to convince Cessna that its wrong to ship the work to China. Heres the PowerPoint mouse, whats your pitch? (Send me an e-mail with the high points covered.) Acknowledging as how that $70,000 figure may be a plant for gullible reporters, only the equally gullible would believe that a U.S. factory could somehow match the China numbers. If we were talking about machine parts or plastics or some other segment where highly productive automation can beat Chinese cheap labor in productivity and quality, youve got a shot. But metal airplanes are still built with ballpeen hammers, Clecos and tin shears-lots of hand operations, not much CAM. You could play the emotional, patriotic card, but that wont fly against the MBAs remorseless spreadsheet.

Five years ago, when we began covering the emergence of diesel engines for aircraft, I thought we were certainly looking at the next big thing. I still think that, but the latest bright shiny object has lost some of its luster. Beginning on page 4 of this issue is an in-depth report on ownership experiences with aircraft diesels and the news is hardly joyful. I used the word “tarnished” in this report and I chose it carefully. Bottom line: After three years in the field in meaningful numbers, owners are pleased with the performance and economy of the market-leading Thielert diesels, but they are clearly unhappy with what many describe as poor reliability, high maintenance costs and, most troubling, weak factory support from Thielert. Make no mistake-the market forces favoring diesel are all but overwhelming. Avgas is scarce in parts of the world and expensive everywhere. Cost-sensitive owners are thus spring-loaded to at least consider, if not enthusiastically support, more efficient powerplants. Some want economy for economys sake. Even so, the entire diesel idea could still tank and take a portion of the GA market with it.

Cessnas announcement in September that it was seeking to buy Columbia had a bit of the sneaky Pete to it. Whether intended or not, the buyout offer got the harder play in breaking news stories, not the fact that Columbia was declaring bankruptcy. Stories in the aviation press seemed to assume that readers and reporters already knew about the bankruptcy and that the Cessna tender was the real news. Yet the two developments occurred almost simultaneously. Interesting timing.

Ill concede that selling airplanes costing more than a half million bucks isn’t exactly a picnic in the current market. There’s plenty of wealth out there to support such purchases, but the competition is fierce, especially between Cirrus, Columbia and Mooney, all of whom ply the high-performance single market with impressive airplanes that really are the best the industry has thus far produced.

Normally, about three days into non-stop AirVenture coverage at Oshkosh, I have a world-class case of the thousand-yard stare. If Im lucky, the vague rivulets of spittle in the corners of my mouth don’t run onto my shirt. This year, there was more new stuff, more airplanes, more vendors and more self-important media pukes running around with notebooks, cameras and recorders than I can ever remember. As Martha Stewart used to say before she taught the girls in C-block to make festive place settings out of prison shivs, its a good thing.

I will freely admit that I have taken cynical delight in shamelessly abusing lunchtime conversation with the tired old joke about knowing there’s money in aviation because I put it there. Its mercifully fresher than the old large-to-small fortune groaner and is thus funnier because it resonates so we’ll with anyone who owns an airplane or who has been remotely associated with anyone who has. And now comes the latest chapter in the dumping-money-into-aviation story, the Light Sport Aircraft phenomenon.

Global competition hasnt so much flattened the world as it has reduced the place to a sort of desert. In some markets, youre doing we’ll to hold your own against the other guy, never mind finding new business. This is intensely true in general aviation where-lets all sigh together here-the universe is in decline. What that means is that if every decision a business makes isn’t the right one, it had better not make too many wrong ones.

Any thinking person-I like to count myself in that group on four days out of seven-is bound to have eureka moments. You know the feeling; a fuzzy-edged world momentarily resolves into crystal clarity, if only fleetingly. I had one of these in April at Sun n Fun, when I came to the inescapable conclusion that Im a dinosaur, a mud-hugging, pea-brained Jurassic throwback. This revelation emerged as I was trying to wake up my feet to keep from embarrassing myself in a crosswind while flying one of the Cub clone LSA airplanes reviewed on page 20 of this issue.

I ran into Nick Carlucci the other day at Home Depot, a guy whose name you probably don’t know. I didnt know him either, until he flagged me down in the plumbing aisle. Running into Carlucci reminded me of something Ive noticed about small airports. They seem to attract three kinds of people: utility users, gadabouts and connected airport guys, of which Carlucci is definitely one.

A couple of summers ago, I was visiting the Diamond Aircraft factory at a lovely Austrian airport called Wiener-Neustadt, just south of Vienna. We were having lunch at an outdoor caf right near the parallel taxiway when I noticed something odd. A Cherokee on its way to the runup pad raced by at what appeared to be near-Warp speed. I didnt think much of it at first, then I noticed another, then another, all of them taxiing fast enough to look like they were about to rotate.