Well, it happens to almost all aircraft manufacturers these days that they go bust at some stage or the other. Cost of certification and numbers to recuperate that cost usually are the main killers, along with product liability insurance cost in the US. They go the way of Columbia Aircraft, Cirrus, and many others who all at some stage failed at the attempt when investors become bored and run off to invest in something which offers faster return.
From the article it appears that the problem was again as it is in all of GA these days: Production and overhead cost needs to be paid by far too few exemplars sold. In order to make money, you need to mass produce, which NONE of the current manufacturers does. Hence the insane new prices. I guess here it was the same as everywhere: They sold airplanes at a loss while ramping up production. If you sell 10 airplanes with an overhead calculated for 100 or even 50 p.a. then it won’t take long before doors will close.
MFGZ are very happy with their 2 Sonacas but with the factory bust, their future will be in limbo.
The only hope would be that some (Chinese?) investor with more vision and financial stamina snaps them up, as it happened to Cirrus, Pipistrel, Diamond, Textron, e.t.c. and then ramps up production to a number which can be sold at a good price without loosing money.
Otherwise it will just be another good design which failed the reality check.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
In order to make money, you need to mass produce
Not necessarily. You only need to produce more expensive stuff, like biz jets and turbine helicopters, or 737s 
To get the price down with mass production, the production numbers (of aircraft) need to increase by 3 orders of magnitude or more (considering it’s even possible to mass produce an aircraft, like for instance cars). This makes mass production of aircraft nonsensical from the start, you will never be able to sell the numbers needed.
GA aircraft production peaked at around 15-18,000 planes a year, three times, which I think is enough to employ some level of mass production techniques, but not enough to really push into throw-away ‘consumer durable’ style design in the way of new cars. GA manufacturers did a pretty good in that era of building them on production lines at reasonable cost to the buyer, and with incredible value when you consider how long they have lasted. The inflation adjusted price and volume trends in this graph are amazing to me.
In relation to the comment above about Chinese ownership, Textron (in the context of GA meaning Cessna, Beech, Lycoming, Bell Helicopter and Pipistrel) is a 12 billion dollar annual sales US owned company employing 37,000 people. It is not Chinese owned like Cirrus, Continental, Diamond etc.
Sonaca is/was a European produced version of the Sling, which seems to be doing OK. I don’t see the existence of the Belgian company as a major issue in the future of the Sling design and although I know there were some mods for European consumption and certification it’s not clear to me on what basis local production for the European market made sense. Why not produce those mods at the main South African facility?
In order to make money you need to achieve a commanding market share in the sector
So a small company has to pick a niche sector. Mass production is not at all necessary to make a lot of money.
I understand Sonaca is over 90% government owned, so rational business decisions were not likely part of their equation. That explains a lot. I imagine Sling got some licensing money out for the deal, no bad thing for them, and they’ve made roughly 1000 planes so far which is starting to be measurable volume.
Whatever the reason, the effect for comparatively new competitors will not be good either. People have no reason to trust in any new promising technologies if practically no company who comes up with such goes bust within the first, most difficult, years.
Piper and Cessna both have decades of experience in designing and building airplanes.
Anybody who thinks he is still so much smarter and can build a much better plane at a much lower price will eventually figure out that he is not.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Piper and Cessna both have decades of experience in designing and building airplanes.Anybody who thinks he is still so much smarter and can build a much better plane at a much lower price will eventually figure out that he is not.
You’re basically saying that innovation is impossible. I’m glad that e.g. Steve Jobs didn’t think that way.
Last time I checked, the “Steve Jobs Phones” have not been much cheaper than the other ones.
Innovation that leads to both cheaper and better products at the same time is extremely rare. Esp. in a highly regulated market like aviation…
Innovation is possible but only where it is possible
Re phones, it seems that Apple lead the way with £1200 phones and a year later Samsung find a way to also sell £1200 phones (mainly by putting in very high perf cameras; the rest is just a phone like any other). There is no parallel to this in GA because of limitations on the engine and avionics. The engine choice defines the airframe which you can attach to it, and vice versa. There are really very few options; in the PT6 world you have a lot of power so you have a bit of legroom because you can build a big slow plane (Caravan) or a smaller faster one (TBM) but in the piston world, once away from the utility stuff (the Islander, etc) you have very little room, and a Rotax XXX defines the rest of the plane which is why Aero Friedrichshafen is full of the same 2-seaters every year. Similarly say a Lyco 320 defined the rest of the plane.
