Timing has been very important in this.
If Cirrus started today they would get nowhere. The whole picture is different now. We have had one or two economic slumps. Cirrus rode up the wave of one strong recovery. Today there would not be any investors.
So one cannot directly compare the success of different models which received the thrust of a big marketing campaign at very different times.
Each new Cirrus model has a lot of new bits and pieces which, at the price of the aircraft, are very happily received. But I wonder to what extent they are also sowing the seeds of their future demise, because – as with cars – the used values plummet, and since the market is not expanding you will eventually end up selling very few new planes. Which is exactly what has happened, though for multiple reasons.
There will always be a residual market for new stuff – as with cars – but it won’t be very big. In the car business it is not bad because you can always offload large numbers of new cars into leasing schemes (at list minus 20-30% but the public doesn’t need to know that) on which the large discount ensures that when the vehicles finally get dumped into the used market, the price is not all that depressed relative to the current list price. This is not available with planes. Schools get discounts (I have seen 20% on a C172, years ago, on a purchase of 3) but schools aren’t buying Cirruses.
Flyer59 wrote:
Do you really think that Cessna has such a “bad marketing” they can only sell 6 (six!) airplanes?
The “marketing” that I’m referring to is the genius of integrating the CAPS.
Everyone in the GA Market completely missed this one, big time !
The ‘other’ big failure was Lancair’s lack of differentiation between their home-built product and the Part 23 certified Columbia.
These are “marketing” decisions, NOT peformance/design decisions.
There are a couple of ways to start a line with an asterisk. Neither are very friendly I’m afraid!
You can write:
%*% Blah
which will give you:
* Blah
or you can write:
<notextile>*</notextile> Blah
which gives the same thing and is clearer, but more typing.
Peter: the Columbia 300 and the SR22 started in the same time.
Michael: There’s some truth to that, but the main reason for the success of the SR22 is in it’s overall quality as a package. And CAPS is not about marketing but a clear USP.
But did they receive the main marketing thrust at the same time?
I don’t think so. I recall Air Touring’s “experiment” with Lancair. A complete joke.
David wrote:
There are a couple of ways to start a line with an asterisk.
Thank you, I’ll try to remember. While we are at it, how about lists with multiple levels? And is there any way to quote them? It would come in handy when quoting regulations. But I guess this discussion should be in the IT/Website section.
Flyer59 wrote:
but the main reason for the success of the SR22 is in it’s overall quality as a package. .
That is your opinion and I do not share it.
But I guess this discussion should be in the IT/Website section.
Yes – feel free to start a thread there.
The best way to quote regs is to do a screenshot and drop it is as an image. I use Faststone screen capture – I wrote it up in that section. The biggest timesaving app in all of IT 
It preserves the layout exactly – something which is just not possible otherwise without supporting fonts and all the HTML constructs which may be appearing in the source code, which then opens the way to exploits. All the other forums get hacked (successfully and usually silently) quite regularly.
Peter wrote:
Will you stop the climb and do a 180 and go back home once you reach FL175, when it’s obvious that FL200 would do it?
Unless you knew positively the reason for the ceiling being FL175 and not FL200 or higher and could determine that would not affect safety you could find yourself in all kinds of trouble. Insufficient flutter margins being one.
If the aircraft had a max certified ceiling of FL175 and I didn’t have more information than that I definitely would.
Unless you knew positively the reason for the ceiling being FL175 and not FL200 or higher and could determine that would not affect safety you could find yourself in all kinds of trouble. Insufficient flutter margins being one.
That is incorrect for a non-turbo type. There is not anywhere near enough power / TAS gain, unless you are planning a Vne dive which starts off sufficiently aggressively to exceed the marked Vne at FL200 or close to it
There is no non-turbo type AFAIK which has a limitation at some altitude. Turbo types can have, and TPs and jets definitely have. And the TB20 POH stops at FL180 on N-reg and FL200 on G-reg… go figure, as they say… but where the POH data stops is not relevant anyway because you run out of power.
