Flight Design Bankrupt (and restarted)

Flight Design GmbH is the company. The FD CT has more SLSA flying in the USA than all other SLSA makers combined, some 400 plus.

The USA has a major distributor and partner in Connecticut FD-USA owned by Tom Peghiny. Tom has been instrumental is seeing that the US customers are happy and covers warranty, parts and now will be sourcing planes from Taiwan directly. Here is the letter he posted on the ctflier.com site where this issue is central and under major scruitny.

Open letter to FD CT Owners

First of all, no one could be more disappointed than we are with the decline then declaration of insolvency of Flight Design GmbH. We have been working with the company for 14 years and have gone through very good times and some bad ones before as well.

I agree with almost all of what has been said but I think it is only right that I answer a few questions that have been put forward here about myself and our company.

Is Flight Design USA a part of Flight Design GmbH? No, we are an independent company. An importer and managers for the brand in the United States only. We own no part of Flight Design GmbH. and along with our Independent Distributors are now significant creditors of Flight Design GmbH.

I personally have been associated with the Flight Design brand for several reasons. One is that I can write and speak well in the English language, which has put me in front of the camera and had me contribute to much of the marketing materials that many of you have read. I am not a director of Flight Design GmbH. and have never been paid by Flight Design for that work that I’ve done.

The USA is a major market for the planes and through a cooperative agreement with our distributors we’ve imported nearly 400 to date. They don’t all come through Connecticut and mostly go direct to the distributors who have their own territory and purchase their own inventory. Our primary job is to manage COSM, support and the airworthiness end for the distributors and their customers. We are not some goliath company.

Did we know ahead of the filing for insolvency? We learned of the decision Friday the 12th, just a couple of days before it became public here on CTFlier. Did we see it coming? Yes, as we’ve been working with the company for a long time we witnessed the slow decline and tried to help raise investment capital for more than two years.

How did we deliver airplanes in the USA? The airplanes we brought here in 2015 were ordered with deposits and some with full payments in 2013, the airframe parts were manufactured in 2014 and were stored in Kamenz for a year. We learned how bad things were at Flight Design only when we went ourselves to participate in the FAA audit last Fall. That’s when we began to scramble to get as many of our planes we could shipped partially finished, including planes that were completely paid (by a distributor). You might have seen pictures of a whole bunch of airframes sitting in Kamenz? We owned 6 of them. We did not buy “other peoples” airplanes for cash as has been suggested. Our cash was already there.

We paid for the labor to finish them in the U.S. and bought many of the parts. We bought engines directly from the German Rotax distributor and engine control parts from Dynon had them shipped to Kamenz, where they were test flown using a test screens, a hand held radio and a flight test parachute. We had the planes shipped to our business in Connecticut and working under what’s called a Workshare Agreement completed the installation of the rest of the avionics bought by either us or our distributors to finish the planes to deliver to their customers. We finished the conformity paperwork and did the weight and balance, sent the paperwork to Germany/Ukraine for inspection, FAA 8130-15 paperwork was issued, the planes were inspected, test flown at length again and delivered. We too had customers that waited nearly three years for their planes.

We are now working with AeroJones who are supporting the engineering side of the company to keep the support and continuous operational monitoring system (COSM) functioning which keeps our planes legal in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world where ASTM standards apply. AeroJones will also make any parts we don’t already have in stock here. We are getting our first shipment of engine mounts (3) this week. I’m going to go over to inspect the first AJA CTLS and CTLSi airplanes for the U.S. at the end of the month.

I am very sorry for the customers in Europe and elsewhere and nothing I can say won’t sound like complete BS to them and I can’t blame them. Again, we and our distributors are actually their creditors in this situation too. I hope that the administrator in Berlin will follow through on his pledge to take care of the retail customers first (before other creditors) and get them their planes.

Tom Peghiny

Silvaire wrote:

That’s inaccurate. Cubcrafters by the end of 2014

I said overall flying…over the past 10 years. Cub Crafters is doing well…but they have FAR fewer SLSAs flying than Flight Design. Same for the just introduced RV SLSA.

Peter wrote:

So FD US owes money to FD GMBH for planes they bought, and FD GMBH owes money to FD US for making them saleable – have I got that right?

Where do you derive that? FD GmbH is screwing Euro customers. US customers are being protected by FD-USA.

Silvaire wrote:

uoting from the same March 24th, 2015

You are missing the point…I said total flying fleet, not one years of sales.