The Good News & The Bad

On the American scene – which is where it all begins as far as most major Australian distributors are concerned – things are indeed stark, according to the authoritative media report we scanned:

Cessna, with 54 per cent of the North American private aircraft market, has halved its dividend and laid off almost a third of its production workforce.

Reason? Excessive inventories of unsold aircraft and short-term debt growing like Topsy.

Earnings from Wichita have slumped by 40 per cent at the end of the fiscal year ended September 30, 1980.

The reporter who filed his copy from America says Cessna blames the US recession, interest rates rising faster than anyone could have imagined, and fuel costs going up like a homesick rocket.

These three factors have also hit Piper (a subsidiary of Bangor Punta Corporation) and Beech (a Raytheon Corporation unit), in the single-engine light aircraft sector.

All this indicates good news for light aircraft buyers in the mid-term period – if the fuel situation doesn’t worsen.

No doubt some of the rub-off will arrive on the Australian market at some time or other, making the scene very much a buyer’s market paradise.

Let’s hope, in all fairness to Australia’s dealers, that the situation doesn’t become too aggravated to the extent alleged in the US report.

Cessna admits that its dealers are troubled by over-zealous discounting; for example, when the company overproduces and has to unload inventory, its dealers almost trample on each other to sell discounted aircraft.

This situation had been hopefully partly overcome as far back as 1977 when Cessna in the US chopped its dealership number from 900-plus to 600.

So much for the bad news . . . what about the good news?

Great things are happening in the world of light aircraft research and the new decade should see some exciting and radical designs either coming onto the world’s market or in the preproduction phase.

Until the latest lightning-fast recession hit North America, sales increases of up to 31 per cent had been recorded annually by most of the world’s big manufacturers. Some of this earning was siphoned off into R & D, in anticipation of what the customer would need in the ’80s – an energy-saving machine.

With a rolling program of development underway, powerplants, aerodynamics, safety, efficiency, environmental protection and avionics are already showing signs of being big factors in future light aircraft design.

In the engine sector, the turboprop shines out as undoubtedly the engine for the early to mid-decade, with centrifugal compressors possibly taking over from the axial type.

Diesel is still far from non-starters . (no pun intended) in the fuel-saving race, although the automobile industry will probably do most of the pre-production work in evolving a lightweight alloy diesel, with turbocharging added for a power increase.

Wankel-type rotaries are another possible in powerplants, although heavy fuel consumption appears to be the barrier to be overcome in this respect.

In any future engine, reduced exhaust pollution must be taken into consideration; more and more light aircraft engines are coming out with computer-controlled power management systems – which should increase TBOs.

We could see some startling changes in prop design and appearance in the mid-term, according to the experts.

Bent tips could reduce noise levels and improve performance; but most of all, designers are turning more and more to the pusher configuration, shoving the prop at the back of the aircraft.

The world is already well into supercritical aerofoils – shapes that mean increased performance in climb speed, cruise and payload.

Winglets are also “in” – devices that increase range while cutting down drag. Canard designs are also well into the testing stage for light aircraft (already proven on ultra-lights like the Rutan Defiant), making them virtually unstallable.

Colour radar for light aircraft, TV-type readouts for checklists and emergency procedures, collision avoidance systems, automated navigation and guidance systems – these are all very much on the list of possibles for the ’80s, according to world expert opinion and research.

Engine monitoring systems based on micro-circuitry will also cut down TBOs in terms of having them done, by providing symptom-detection systems.

It all sounds great – one wonders what the whole caboodle will cost, and whether flying will be half as much fun.