IMHO this is yet another stupid discarding of a brand name which has a high quality image (well, on the TBM side, at least 
) for one that nobody had heard of.
The actual release should read “The Chairman decides to rename the company after himself just because he can”.
I think the TBM brand is probably stronger now than either Socata or Daher.
Next thing all “Socata” product will be orphaned..
Sorry, couldn’t help myself :)
Since the TBM drivers are now flying an oligarch moniker they would be worse of if Mr Berezovsky or Mr Deripaska christened their plane
The view from the USA is that Mr Daher wants to keep it going as before, but who knows?
There is no issue with keeping an N-reg TB20 going, because you don’t need Type Certificate support for an N-reg. You can fabricate any airframe parts IAW AC14-43 etc. Most other parts are not made by Socata anyway. The time you would have a real problem is if you rolled the aircraft on landing and smashed the composite roof (on a GT). But I doubt Socata have any spares for those anyway.
Anyway I seriously doubt Socata will abandon the piston TB parts business which is IMHO worth about €1-3M in annual sales. It was always worth so much to Socata that it was a big block to any transfer of TB manufacture to other parties (several such ventures failed). And without owning the parts business, restarting TBs is obviously worthless.
I suppose Mr Daher must’ve considered the manner in which pronunciation of his name will be butchered by the English speaking world? Daher as a company name is not quite as ill conceived as renaming Eurocopter ‘Airbus Helicopters’ but it does invite mispronunciation outside of France. Socata is a well known name and I’m surprised they gave it up.
Long term ‘support’ for EASA Type Certificates doesn’t seem to require parts support (legally), although selling parts might well be the motivation for the OEM. For EADS supplying parts apparently isn’t worth the bother in many cases and they have just one guy in an office in Manching (used to be Ottobrunn) for light aircraft they’ve inherited. His work appears to be mainly paperwork related. For parts he sends people here and there, a process doubtless simpler for him if the aircraft is N-registered.
Does one buy a plane (or not) because of how the name might sound?
Ford Nova in LatAm comes to mind.
I can’t imagine sales of the Pipistrel Virus have been encouraged by the name.
Another one that made me smile was the Daihatsu Charade car. I once had a Cagiva motorcycle with a sticker on the side that proudly proclaimed ‘pure emotion’, leaving one with the question of whether there was anything more concrete to ensure ongoing forward progress
Pemex, the nationalized Mexican oil company, actually sold gasoline called ‘Nova’ for a while! The car was a GM product.
Da-42 V1 – any potential customers put off by the V1 connotation? All signs point to No. Same for Pipistrel.
I would say that everybody can pronounce “virus”, “V1” is going to matter only to people far too old to be flying a plane, but very few people know how to pronounce “daher” and the word itself is rather an unattractive one.
“Charade” is an awful cockup and obviously they didn’t do a proper check on it before they ran with it. But not as bad as a company which existed many years ago called “Climax Electronics”
One problem is that you never know how a bad name affects sales.
And if Mr Daher sells the business, they will have to rename the whole thing again.
