Your ability to state my views is so lame you should stop trying.

Mike C.

Your ability to state my views is so lame you should stop trying.

Mike C.

That's nonsense, ignoring history to maintain your views.

Eclipse built 270 examples, delivering 161 airplanes in 2008. That's perhaps the highest production rate ever achieved for a light jet in the history of aviation.

If Eclipse can't make a profit at that rate, it was NEVER going to make a profit.

From the bankruptcy filing for Eclipse, the PARTS they were buying were more than they were charging the customers. They would have lost money if the assembly was FREE.

They owed creditors over $1B having made 270 airplanes, ~$4M per airplane, and Eclipse paid for SOME of those parts before they stopped paying. They then sold these airplanes mostly around $1.4M a copy. Yeah, we can make that up in volume... NOT.

Making them faster only makes you lose money faster. Production is what put Eclipse in bankruptcy.


Dayjet.

Bankrupt.

Any charter or air taxi operation will find it more economical to operate a larger airplane. The cost difference for the airplane is minimal given all the other overheads in charter operations, and the larger airplane opens more markets and trips you can perform.

Hence, charter guys fly CJ2, CJ3, Phenom 300, at the small end of the market. When a customer is paying $2.5K/hour for a jet, saving $200/hour to fly a tiny Eclipse makes no sense. That will be the same for the SF50.

Mike C.

They charge enough to cover production costs. Duh.

All the examples you listed are priced to do that. Go look up their prices. This is unlike the SF50 at $1.4M.

Mike C.

Mike, whilst I agree with your premise it's like comparing pets.com to internet commerce.........which I can tell you is alive and well...........

Eclipse is going to make it my friend........that you had a bunch of folks using money for brains is not relevant now...........the Cirri Jet, same with the PC12 (very smart and good engineering, way better in fact than the folks that put together the MU2)...........

Cars are going to go the way of the dodo bird and aviation will rule the 3 dimensional skies.......

what Mike has come to realize is that the Citation line is not on par with the PC12 and he's now looking at the PC24........

welcome back Mike, you were missed

Eh, Mike, try thinking outside the box We are talking about redefining the whole paradigm of transportation here. 160 airplanes in a year? That's pittance. Try 16,000. How much do you think it would cost to make one at that rate? I'd say about $300K. Now the airplanes are cheap enough to compete with the airlines, and we are going to need many thousands of them.

Dayjet was a great concept that was ahead of it's time. It could have been very successful but went under due to the same reasons (underfunding and economic crisis) as Eclipse. I am pretty sure once the memory of that fades away, there is going to be a reincarnation in the future.

As a matter of fact, once Uber is done building its network of those autonomous electric VTOL drones zooming around the cities, they will likely start looking into longer range on-demand transportation, and will run into physical limitations of those batteries. At that point very small jets (probably even smaller than SF50 and Eclipse) will become quite attractive.

Imagine Apple or Google investing $15B to build 50,000 of those. That's the economy of scale we are talking about.

That ain't the SF50. Maybe you need to start another thread to discuss your fantasy.


There would be 15,000 of them sitting in the Arizona desert and the company that built them would be bankrupt.

Note that a $300K jet would still cost about the same to operate, so just making the jet cheaper doesn't really change the overall economics that much. As well all know, there's a lot more to the cost of flying than just buying the machine.

Mike C.

As you may recall, this particular part of the conversation is not about SF50 but about whether Vern's concept of reducing the cost by mass-producing the airplanes is sound.

No need to start another thread, we love our thread creep around here .

Surely not. The company would be something like Apple or Google, for whom $15B is play money.


Not exactly. You get better prices for fuel when operating 10,000 airplanes, and everything else would be way cheaper. Parts would be 1/10th of the price, service and maintenance way more efficient at mass scale, and maybe no pilots if we look far enough in the future.

Boeing knows better. The 737 line is hardly "modern", it's been running since the 1960s and was designed around 707 tooling but it builds a 737 in just 9 days. Monthly output has gone from 17 to 47 per month now, 52 next year and 57 per month in 2019, without a commensurate increase in either labor or floor space, due to automation like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7ix0t4ivE0
There is when automation lets you do it without 10x the manpower or floor space, as Boeing demonstrates.

They charge enough to cover production costs. Duh.

All the examples you listed are priced to do that. Go look up their prices. This is unlike the SF50 at $1.4M.

Mike C.

Welcome back Mike! I've love this thread from an objective perspective. I love aviation and production. You can buy an RV-x cheaper than you can build one but there are folks who will spend for what they want (it's hard to justify bass boats tow vehicles and tackle). Aviation is difficult for the middle class. So, from my perspective as lower middle class, and my aviation perspective and presuppositions come from a transition. From working up the rating game; Champ to T-210, to Lear, to Gulfstream. I see the SF50 as the bass boat for the lower upper class.

I'm cracking up. The insults from Mike C just keep on coming. It's like listening to Don Rickles talking about airplanes!

We know that position 341 is a $1.39M plane. Thus MOST of the order book is the low price contracts and it perhaps extends well into the 400s. On the (often missed) production schedule, they aren't past that position until well into 2021, more likely 2022.

I am specifically not ignoring the facts about what price they sold positions.

Mike C.

Apparently you take the same pills as some founders of aircraft companies.

There's no way to get from today to your imagined future. The infrastructure, available pilots, regulations, price/volume curve, airport capacity, air traffic control, etc, all conspire to prevent being over the hump.

You are essentially preaching the religion of Eclipse. Build it cheap and darken the skies with thousands. Didn't work out, never will.

Mike C.

And the cost of a 737 went down how much?

They now go for about ~$110M. The first 737 was sold for just over $3M.

The automation was about capacity improvement not cost reduction.

BTW, lots of humans in that video staging the materials, checking the work, running the wires, etc. The "automation" is a CNC riveter. Similar devices have been in use for a while, even at Cessna, the Boeing one is noteworthy for the scale.

The automation is not having a profound impact on the price. The automation is not free.

Mike C.