That article is downright scary!
And Lancair don’t think this is an issue!
They will never get this certified, for the various reasons listed and probably others. More likely they will collapse, because anybody with $1M+ has a good lawyer and will sue when presented with this sort of situation, outside the homebuilt arena. That is what happened to Epic, more or less. Plenty online about customer disputes.
A single bus is not itself going to prevent certification but it is dumb when you have a PT6 which normally has two generators/alternators.
I am astonished to read of this. Depressing.
Also interesting this has not come up in the Lancair forum. But then that is standard in GA where you don’t wash your dirty washing publicly, because the factory will cut your throat on support.
But perhaps not surprising, given e.g. the crap hoses and fittings that Lancair used to supply for their retractable landing gear.
interesting that as an owner of the PT6 driven Lancair, he’s excited by the recip engine version.
You need to pick your way through the hyperbolae though…
You can read more or less anything you want into the above. To me, one thing which is non-negotiable in any plane is crappy / dangerous low speed handling. The flying may be fun but eventually it is likely to kill you. Especially in Europe where the “mission profile” has to include 500m tarmac runways otherwise the plane will be just another hangar queen, engine rusting away, because the fun/hassle ratio is not good enough. Call me boring 
I am also sure he appreciates that 170kt at 28k is 260kt TAS which is what most people fly a TBM700/850 at.
Austin is quite a character. I met him many years ago when he had just released X-Plane. I have a lot of respect for him, he may easily be one of the brightest people out there in terms of aviation software and quite possibly in the whole industry. The idea he had with Xavion is quite ingenious and I’d try it if I had an Iphone. Xplane itself is a massively complex platform which has capabilities much beyond the scope of a normal flight simulator.
Yet Austins background has to be considered when reading his blogs. Xplane was in fact conceived as a tool for experimental builders to test fly their creations before they even build them. Austin considers himself an aerodynamics expert (which to an extent he is) and he definitly knows a lot about the subject. Whether he knows it all better than people like Lancair has to remain open, but he certainly will try to bring his input to them. Whether that is welcome is another question. He may well be smarter than a lot of the people he confronts about what he thinks of as shortcomings, whether those people want to go where he wants to go is a question he doesn’t particularly care about. Maybe that is why Lancair is not particularly responsive to him, even though, in their place, if Austin sais something, I’d listen.
Certainly Austin is not the kind of guy who will buy an airplane and just fly it. He’ll anaylze it and theorize about how he could make it better. Hence he will go into such discussions such as about turboprop vs combustion engine in the quest for the ideal airplane, which he will never build but try to get closer to. I would not be surprised if one day he dumps his evolution for something that corresponds more to his particular ideas.
i do have a lot of respect for him in another matter. He has been fighting quite a fight against US patent trolls, who appear to be trying to extort money from android developers quite successfully. That is why he does currently not develop for android, as he was sued by a patent troll after releasing x-plane on that platform. The corresponding threads are quite interessting to read.
The other bit to consider when looking at his post is the very fact why an Evolution is “cheaper” than a TBM900 or similar: It IS an experimental airplane, therefore the owners of such planes are part of it’s evolution and quite literally lab rats who will find out quite a lot which in a certified airplane would have been rectified prior to certification. I would not expect stuff like the hydraulics problem in a certified airplane, nor would I expect failures like the one he describes with the pressurisation as a system like that would not make it past certification. Or for that matter, an airplane whose take off power is 50% of the actual engine power available because adding more will flip it on it’s back!
That is the crux: People think wow, this is a great airplane, which it is, but it is not a fully developed and tested airframe about which the book has been written and approved. This is something which definitly has to be taken into account when considerering buying a plane like that.
Peter wrote:
To me, one thing which is non-negotiable in any plane is crappy / dangerous low speed handling. The flying may be fun but eventually it is likely to kill you. Especially in Europe where the “mission profile” has to include 500m tarmac runways otherwise the plane will be just another hangar queen, engine rusting away, because the fun/hassle ratio is not good enough.Call me boring
+1 !!! … and THAT is why I fly a CERTIFIED Lancair 
I loved this quote from Asustin’s entertaining article
At times like that, a Cessna 172 starts to look REEEEAAAAALLLLL good.
Because a Cessna 172 would still be delivering 100 knots at that point, while the Evo is delivering 0 knots and abut a $40,000 maintenance bill to go nowhere at all!
The simple fixed gear, and fixed prop, tourers enjoy excellent maintenance related despatch which never seems to be taken into account when people move up the complex food chain.
Curiously, very little of what Austin writes has appeared in the Lancair forum.
Of course this is not unusual for forums – most owners choose aircraft resale value preservation, over keeping others informed And other factors e.g. publishing one’s own accidents, etc.
But I am sure he is not making it up.
Reading between the lines (which usually takes really minimal effort) he is probably in the same position I was in, in 2002, when I had a load of hassle with the TB20 (largely, I think, because Socata did a huge Gallic Shrug and built it with a pile of avionics returned to them with intermittent faults) and Air Touring / Socata were dragging their heels, so I took it to the Socata owners group, where they got really pi*ssed off (and AT and Socata got pi*ssed off too) and, I later found out, discussed behind the scenes whether to chuck me out because I was reducing their resale values. Then the admin set up a “secret” (admin-approved owners only) forum section where such stuff could be discussed.
My guess, seeing this, is that Lancair is a rather disorganised outfit which drives owners up the wall. Much as the other kit vendors have been, e.g. the well documented Epic. They are probably making very little money, because after the initial kit sale, most builders will bypass them for all they can.
A certified vendor at least gets a nice revenue stream for some decades, until the plane is scrapped. For a TB20, company maintained and averagely syndicate-abused, Socata get something like 2k a year in parts sales, which is say 60k on top of each plane’s sale, and with ~2k in the current fleet that comes to 4M annual sales – for doing very little beyond buying uncertified bits from a load of little French companies, spending a fortune on inkjet toner printing out EASA-1 forms, and paying a few people to run it. That is incidentally, AIUI, why all attempts for 3rd party TB production restarts have failed… it is a nice earner. The parts income is also inflation-protected – Socata parts are going up some 10% a year.
Lancair won’t have much of that. Maybe a few hundred k $ – barely enough to pay 1 person and fixed costs.
Peter wrote:
Also interesting this has not come up in the Lancair forum. But then that is standard in GA where you don’t wash your dirty washing publicly, because the factory will cut your throat on support.
I don’t think it’s about factory support (or lack of). The GA community is probably one of the most self policing communities around. The reason is linked to the reason we fly in the first place: to make a dream come true. Talking “bad” (being honest) about for instance the Evolution on an Evolution forum is like swearing in church. No one is interested to hear things that can shatter the dream. I almost got thrown out of the Sonex forum for this reason, telling the truth about the Aerovee engine (half of the parts I have got from other sources due to way below accepted quality). I hardly ever visit the forum anymore.
However, people also communicate one to one, and these forums are great places to get in contact with others, from all over the world.
Yes, of course, you get the “church of scientology” mentality too… Most types suffer from it, some a lot more than others.
