Hey I resemble that remark
I fly a corporate PC12, an SR22, and an R66.

You're right my job is easy and without an XM radio it would be very boring. But I tell guys like you all the time we don't get paid to fly. We get paid to live with a cell phone. We get paid to miss birthdays and anniversaries. Many could not do what we do..

If you're still in Business after 4 years of the "New Normal" of selling anything you had better be serious. I had the same situation from Piper. They called me to see if I wanted to demo a new bird. It was very nice.

I've owned a Beechcraft since 1992 (actually from a corporate standpoint since 1984) and I have never been called by Beech to inquire if I wanted a new airplane. In 2009, I may very well could have been talked into a new airplane especially with the accelerated depreciation but I had no one to talk me into anything other than looking on Controller/TAP/BT for airplanes.

If your bar for success is 13 planes a year then I guess you don't have to work so hard.

OTOH, if you don't have a superior product then you've got a hard sell. That is what the Piper salesman found out. His company also represented Pilatus so I told him to sell me a nice used one. Its been two months and I still haven't heard back from him.

Hey I resemble that remark
I fly a corporate PC12, an SR22, and an R66.

You're right my job is easy and without an XM radio it would be very boring. But I tell guys like you all the time we don't get paid to fly. We get paid to live with a cell phone. We get paid to miss birthdays and anniversaries. Many could not do what we do..

That is not correct, they are here.

These are actually hard to come by.

Sounds fun to me

If it was a 22 on the right I would pick it (A SR20 I would sell). Otherwise I would pick the Bo and sell it.
Sure the 22 is a dime a dozen plane but they have the market mass to continue getting newer and nicer toys added before others. e.g. One of the few planes you can get a retrofit Avadyne R9 installed in.... How long has the DFC90 been available for the Cirrus, two or three years and only now available for the Bo?


Tim

Probably true, but at the macro level I don't think they do the opposite of what makes sense. In other words, charging more for a retract makes sense. Charging less for an IR pilot makes sense, statistically speaking.

And really the whole insurance thing was not even what I was disputing. You seem to be under the impression that higher time pilots and instrument rated pilots are more likely to get in an accident than lower time and/or VFR-only pilots. I believe you got this impression by grossly misinterpreting some statistics you read, and I was trying to point that out before you spread misinformation all over the interwebs!

Here's a quote from the Cirrus article you linked: "Unfortunately, we do not know the proportion of Cirrus pilots with high or low experience. Therefore, we cannot determine if pilots with low experience have a greater rate of accidents."

See, the author of that article gets it. Unfortunately, that one line was the only thing to prevent people from falling into the huge trap they laid with those graphs showing that more Cirri crashed with high time pilots on board than low time pilots...

Take it from the guy who has loaded over 70k accident reports into a postgres database to run queries on them (me). Per flight hour, higher time pilots are safer. A lot safer.


Actually, logic would not have that at all. It's quite possible that all those VFR-only pilots never even leave the ground. That would make it pretty hard for them to get in an accident! Now, we know they do, in fact, fly... but my point is they might fly far, far less than their IR counterparts. If all you have is the total number of VFR and IFR qualified pilots, you cannot speculate as to which group should get in more accidents, because you don't know which group flies more.


Again, I realize calculating aviation insurance premiums is more of an art than a science, but I'm pretty sure they get the big ticket items like "IR pilots are safer" right.

Now that's game, set, and match...... WELL PUT

I wouldn't say that Cirrus is so far ahead across the board. I took random samples of the last ten years of all accidents recorded by the NTSB that involved Beech Bonanzas and Cirrus. 30 samples from Beech, which included single engine V-Tails and Straight Tails only, and took 30 samples from Cirrus, SR22 & SR20. The results were intriguing.

Statistics show that if a pilot is involved in an accident in a single engine Beech they will survive 73.3% of the time. However, flying a Cirrus the survivor rate is only 56.7%. Another way of saying it, if a pilot flies a Cirrus and encounters an accident the pilot will likely die 43.3% of the time. In a Beech Bonanza, the likelihood of a fatal outcome is only 26.6%.

Cirrus is way ahead actually. That’s a 62.5% increase over Beech that the pilot is more likely to die in an accident in a Cirrus vs Beech Bonanza.

A good friend of mine, who has been flying for a looong time and is a very capable pilot (not a newby greenhorn blah blah blah, whatever), and is well-heeled too, recently was in the market for a new plane. He has the money and wouldn't consider used.

He bought a Cirrus, not a Bo. When I asked him why, he said he really didn't even consider the Bo, because the new Cirrus had everything he wanted already installed... namely turbo and FIKI. The chute was just a bonus. To get turbo and FIKI done to a new Bo would have "taken too much time and would have invalidated the warranty." He is a busy guy, knew what he wanted, and didn't want to wait or do the sweat equity. Thus, he really only felt he had one option which was Cirrus.

No question we all love our planes, and most of us are very passionate about them. Part of the reason I love mine is because I get to tinker with it and enjoy the process of incrementally improving it. I suspect that these reasons may make me a dying breed unfortunately. He loves his plane because it was turn-key. He didn't and doesn't want to tinker, period. He just wanted to get in a "state-of-the-art" machine and go. And apparently this is what most new airplane buyers want, and Cirrus has figured this out very well.

Until Beech wakes up and realizes that most folks are buying Cirri for all sorts of reasons, none of which Beech is doing very well apparently, then nothing will change for Beech. Hopefully the good that will come of Beech's BK will be to force them to look in the mirror and realize that they need to make planes that people want to buy, not planes that people want to nurture. If they're smart, they're lurking this thread...

I tell myself and others that I enjoy making improvements, but in unguarded moments I have to admit that I'd take a turnkey airplane in a heartbeat.

Yeah. I about went stir-crazy for 3.5 weeks while my plane was down for some cylinder overhauls in December...

I don't like standing in lines at airports either.

Game, Set, Match....

There is a big consideration that needs to come into play here. Any new person getting into aviation has a chance to own a Beechcraft, due to the vast supply of used airplanes on the market. One could certainly get a used Bo for as little as $30K, and hone their skills for a step-up plane. Doubt they could afford a used Cirrus.

What real incentive does Beechcraft have to improve their piston line? I am wondering what percentage of their total annual revenue comes from selling Bonanzas and Barons? As far I'm concerned this Cirrus vs. Beech argument is like saying Mercedes needs to improve their C-Class, since the Infiniti G37 has more gadgets and is outselling the C-Class.

I'm aware of several folks on here that have moved from a Cirrus to a G36 or Baron. Not sure as many folks are moving the other way except for Alejandro.