Yeah, officially, officially, they didn’t stop TB production until about 2005 
They served excellent smoked salmon sandwiches to a colleague I brought to Tarbes to look at a TB21, in mid 2003, a couple of years after the decision was made silently to stop TB production. I think it was badly managed… as per that other thread, I think they could have done quite a lot with it. The SR22 was a lot more pricey.
Certainly it is much easier to run a low productivity operation around a $3M plane than around a $300k plane.
Well, it took me a few days but I managed to read the very interesting restarting the tb thread .
Bottom line is we need a bigger market for any of these initiatives (new designs, restart of production, improved aircraft designs, lower costs of new aircraft…) to bear fruit. Simply speaking and regardless of the inefficiencies within the old GA manufacturers, the market is not large enough to allow a bit of healthy competition and development.
Everyone who decides to make a big investment on a new design or a new POA (production org) will find it very hard to make financial sense of the effort.
IN my view the biggest initiative we can do to help all this defunct or dying aviation is promoting GA in whichever coordinated way we can . Even if the established manufacturers eliminated all their inefficiencies and lowered their prices 30%, the market would not be much different.
Plse feel free to direct this to another thread if there is one on the topic.
