Well, it took me a few days but I managed to read the very interesting restarting the tb thread .
Bottom line is we need a bigger market for any of these initiatives (new designs, restart of production, improved aircraft designs, lower costs of new aircraft…) to bear fruit. Simply speaking and regardless of the inefficiencies within the old GA manufacturers, the market is not large enough to allow a bit of healthy competition and development.
Everyone who decides to make a big investment on a new design or a new POA (production org) will find it very hard to make financial sense of the effort.
IN my view the biggest initiative we can do to help all this defunct or dying aviation is promoting GA in whichever coordinated way we can . Even if the established manufacturers eliminated all their inefficiencies and lowered their prices 30%, the market would not be much different.
Plse feel free to direct this to another thread if there is one on the topic.
Yeah, officially, officially, they didn’t stop TB production until about 2005 
They served excellent smoked salmon sandwiches to a colleague I brought to Tarbes to look at a TB21, in mid 2003, a couple of years after the decision was made silently to stop TB production. I think it was badly managed… as per that other thread, I think they could have done quite a lot with it. The SR22 was a lot more pricey.
Certainly it is much easier to run a low productivity operation around a $3M plane than around a $300k plane.
I seem to recall that the official reason they gave at the time was in order to concentrate their resources on the TBM range.
TB serial numbers. Probably about 2k of all the TB airframes (9,10,200,20,21). At a guess, 1500 still flying.
Restarting the TB. Nobody will say for sure why they stopped but I think they lost interest because their marketing in the USA was crap and by 2002 Cirrus was eating everybody’s lunch.
Nice videos. A lot of effort must have gone on that first one Zsoszu. Thx for posting.
The TB series are beautiful, well supported and, as Peter keeps bragging about in here , capable and efficient aircraft.
A pity they stopped production. Knowing Peter, perhaps already answered in here, but how many did they sell in the last few years of production and why did they stop manufacture?
Nice video! Apparently I ferried your aircraft from Norway to Denmark in 2015. Looks a lot better now :-)
Very nice – would have been even nicer if you had used a prop filter
Very nice
A small new video is out…
Lovely video @Zsoszu. Thanks for sharing.
