Plenty more people kill themselves driving – thank god nobody got the idea of sueing the driving schools!
Time for legal reform methinks.
Isn’t the US legal system all about the search for deep pockets?
When I was about to open a US subsidiary, the working title of it was SOSUMI Inc.
Isn’t the US legal system all about the search for deep pockets?
The more I hear about this from Americans the more it looks like it is highly context specific. If it wasn’t, business in the USA would be impossible because anybody with assets would be sooner or later terminated. In the broad sense, litigation in the USA is about the same as in Europe i.e. lots of people will have a go and the insurance company will give them 10k-20k to make them p*ss off. And even in aviation, for example the class action against Lyco over the crankshafts never got off the ground. Lyco did some deals under an NDA and thus placated the most aggressive opponents.
I still don’t get the Cirrus claim.
Isn’t the US legal system all about the search for deep pockets?
When I was about to open a US subsidiary, the working title of it was SOSUMI Inc.
Careful: the American Bar Association is watching you……. 
GA manufacturers – out of touch with reality.
Brand spanking new 1950es technology going for a measly 120k USD.
http://www.airpowerinc.com/productcart/pc/TLEngineDetail.asp?catID=33&prodID=10267
I’m pretty sure they have committee after committee of experts and auditors trying to figure out why there is no increase in sales volume.
I pay about 12,000€ for a new Volvo 5-cylinder common rail diesel engine block for boats. However, the block is 100% identical to the car engine, all marinization was done outside the block — for a reason! If they had to keep a complete company going on those engines and produce them all in-house, the business model would not work at all.
Lycoming just take the total cost of their inadequate company and calculate the price of an engine so that it adds up. That’s just overhead as there is no R&D at all. Mercedes spend over €1b when they evolve an engine to the next generation. There isn’t even $1 at Lycoming to come up with a new valve cover design.
It’s sad and just a function of the market size. Who wants to do anything in a shrinking market? Every dollar you make, you have to take from somebody.
Look – a Skytec starter! Not such a bad deal. Look at the doughnut, not the hole
How much is a new IO540-C4D5D? In 2008 they were about $60k, from some cost-plus box shifter.
You can turn it around and say market size is a function of pricing too… Mercedes didn’t get to the figures they are now by selling (unreliable) stuff at prices 0.0000001% of the market can afford…
That’s true, but let’s look at the process whereby the volume could be boosted.
If Lyco kept dropping their new prices down and down, eventually they would put the overhaul industry out of business. Which, hey, would kill their overhaul parts sales
And to achieve that they would need to drop their prices by a factor of about 3×.
And nobody will overhaul their (perfectly running) engine at say 1000hrs instead of 2000hrs even if the overhaul was just $10k.
Piston aviation is a shrinking market and Lycoming won’t be able to do anything about it, even if they gave away their engines for free. There is simply no story for an investor with brains. No return on R&D can be reasonably expected. Lycoming/Conti had their engines paid for a long time ago but even then there was significant government involvement. Thielert/SMA sunk a lot of stupid investor money.
I would never invest in a shrinking market as a matter of principle. You only have to be average to do OK in a growing market but you have to be very very good to build a business in a shrinking market.
