Summation of 358 pages on the Cirrus SF50:

1) Some members love the aircraft, hopes it succeeds.
2) Some members hate the aircraft, hopes it fails.
3) Lots of speculation, baseless opinions and tons of rhetoric.
4) Some members have little interest, knowing they'll never be able to afford one, but "tune in" here to see any new information and/or developments on the aircraft.

The number of pages would be reduced by a sizable number if a few members either PM'ed each other or just fought to the death in a cage match. Either way.....a more concise, informative discussion would occur.

And, in November, this thread will be 3 years old....and going strong!

Sad to say that I've read every post on all 359 pages!

Nah you missed at least one other group. I think the plane super stupid; but will sell like hot cakes and succeed.

Tim

If we do one word per post, can we get to 360? You can then skip a page. I promise, nothing new will be stated.

Tim

Yes, true, but would it be as entertaining?

I think this summary first came up on about page 10....

There's one more category, which I put myself in.

5) Doesn't like the plane (I don't hate it, just don't like it), but hopes it will succeed.

I hope the SF50 is successful. It will help the light jet market overall.

Very much so, it is a gateway drug that will make its owners want a real jet in short order.

Mike C.

It is a fairly solid assumption.

They raised the price a lot. You don't do that if you have margin, you'd rather build a larger order book and build more of them. After they raised the price, sales crawled.

Then there is the basic math of adding up the parts. FJ33-5A OEM cost is around $800K. The Garmin package is around $200K. Start adding up all the costs for the bill of materials, wheels, brakes, pumps, environmental, etc, and you soon run out of margin before you even bolt them together. You also have to include liability, labor, overhead, etc.

The odds Cirrus is making a profit at $1.39M is very low, and if they are, it is microscopic. It will be a challenge to break even as they make at least 350 of the units at the low price point.


It doesn't take a genius to estimate what the parts cost and to see that making a profit is challenging.

Mike C.

Where's all the money you are supposed to be saving with having only one engine?

You can fly a real jet for that much, especially when you consider the cost per mile.

I'm with Yuri, that doesn't sound like operating cost... that's more than a CJ1... I'd have to look... probably more than a CJ2.

Mike C,

You are making a lot of assumptions there. Starting with the engine price.
Consider, Cirrus has a 600 plane backlog, that is a rather large volume order to negotiate discounts.
So unless you can produce financials, or contracts all we have is speculation. As much as some people here make fun of the current owners, they do have a stereotype of being good in math. As such, if there was no hope of making a return like you postulate, they likely would never have approved the project to start. These basic details were known years ago, before Cirrus was even acquired.

As for profit margin, I laugh at your statement about raising it. I dealt with a database vendor who purchased another company. Minimal to no new development going on, and the product was to phased out over the next few releases. A federal agency decided it was the new standard, the following year the database price more than tripled with almost no new features.

More then one company charges exactly what the market will bear, only engineers try and match production costs to product price. Sales/business people find ways to change the rules to cover the costs or raise it to make as much as the market will stand.

Tim

Right, they are not going to be making a profit at $1.39M, but they won't be losing much money either. The jump to $2M+ is what will allow them to recoup the development costs and make a profit. That will have to wait for a couple of years, but they can afford it with all the free money Chinese pumped into Cirrus.

This isn't the Eclipse situation of being at the mercy of venture capitalist investors. They are are basically owned by Chinese government.

So if everything goes just right, they will make ~400 airplanes over the next 3 years and only lose a little money on production, never mind development costs.

Sounds like an aviation business plan to me.


If anybody buys at that price. The order book length basically froze with the price increase.


Eclipse spent nearly $6M per airplane and sold most of them at around $1.3M. Why do you think the VCs caused their problems? It was vendors who refused to ship any more product without payment. Duh.

Mike C.

VCs caused the problem because they didn't give them more money to pay the vendors.

Chinese is a different story. They have unlimited funds, they are a patient bunch, and the profit isn't a primary motivator for them in this case.