From here
The reality is, the future is turbines or electric. Piston engine aircraft will not be produced for that much longer. Nobody is going to pay $900K for a piston anything in 10 years. The delta is getting smaller and smaller between them.
Textron will drop both the Bonanza and the Baron within the next 2 years, my guess. How long can Mooney continue? Diamond? Cessna might hold on to the 172 and 182 a little bit longer, as will Cirrus – but the end is in sight.
AdamFrisch wrote:
The reality is, the future is turbines or electric.
I don’t think electric is going to be practical for leaving the pattern for a long time yet (at any speed, I’m sure you could make some glider type thing that has reasonably long range but slow speed, especially if you run it like a glider with a zig zag vertical profile). The energy density of batteries isn’t there yet, and while it’s getting better, it’s definitely not Moore’s Law level improvements that it needs to be.
Turbines are more promising, if they can get the capital price down.
However, my rather pessimistic prediction is this: the population of SEP-GA pilots (as opposed to bizjet level GA) is shrinking, and the extant body of airframes is quite durable, especially with any level of maintenance at all. Given the declining demand and relatively constant supply, used airframe prices will drop, which not only will reduce the value of the rest of the used fleet, but will undermine the market for any new certified airframes, because there aren’t enough aerodynamic tricks left to generate a step change in improvement over an SR-22 or an M201. To the extent that people will go for new airframes, they will more likely be true experimentals or factory built “experimentals” like the Epic for the high end.
So, my long term prediction is you get turbines starting from the Meridian/Jetprop level, and the market below that will simply be unserved because it’s so hard to compete economically with either kits (no certification costs) or the extant fleet (already depreciated), until you get down to the ultralight/LSA level.
I suppose if the FAA really re-writes part 23, that might make it more viable for new airframes to come into play, but I’m skeptical. LSAs, which were supposed to be the new cheaper/easier to certify option are still 100k aircraft for performance generally inferior to a C172.
So, most likely you’ll have a JetProp and an electric pattern trainer, with very little in between, at least until the airframes really start aging out in another twenty or thirty years.
ETA: This is already sort of the case for MEPs, as they’re dirt cheap used and the only ones currently in new production are mostly for the training organizations, not personal/business use. To the first approximation anybody looking for a twin will buy used, or step up to a turbine, but the minimum entry barrier for a turbine is that much higher in terms of maintenance, fuel burn, and general overhead.
Just one disagreement: powered gliders have a large whetted area and quite high fuel consumption. An efficent aircraft designed for powered flight would have a higher wing loading.
kwlf wrote:
powered gliders have a large whetted area and quite high fuel consumption. An efficent aircraft designed for powered flight would have a higher wing loading.
Depends on your design spec. Most of the really low energy consumption aircraft have a very glider like wingplan, in that they have enormous high aspect ratio wings, and also operate in a relatively narrow speed range. For moving 2-6 people at 150kts, you would move towards smaller wings, but for maximum range, especially on electric power, I think you want bigger wings flying slowly.
redRover wrote:
However, my rather pessimistic prediction is this: the population of SEP-GA pilots (as opposed to bizjet level GA) is shrinking, and the extant body of airframes is quite durable, especially with any level of maintenance at all. Given the declining demand and relatively constant supply, used airframe prices will drop, which not only will reduce the value of the rest of the used fleet, but will undermine the market for any new certified airframes, because there aren’t enough aerodynamic tricks left to generate a step change in improvement over an SR-22 or an M201. To the extent that people will go for new airframes, they will more likely be true experimentals or factory built “experimentals” like the Epic for the high end.
I think this is exactly correct except for me its not pessimistic or negative, it’s an opportunity to buy and own nice used certified aircraft at affordable prices and fly them for the rest of my life, or until I’m too old to fly. No generation before has ever had such an opportunity, and I’m thankful that its unfolded that way for me. In so many other areas it’s gone in the other direction and presented a challenge, e.g. huge housing cost inflation for several decades before I entered the market. I think it’s important to recognize when fate has dealt you a good hand and act on it!
I couldn’t care less about $900K new aircraft, piston or turbine. Given more attractive used options I would never buy one even if the money were available and their production has no effect on the broader market.
I generally agree that it provides good opportunities, if you know what you’re doing and what you want, but I think it does have some negative impact on innovation and R&D, because the market is so small. The FAA is working on this to some extent by allowing equipment from the experimental side to end up in certified aircraft (like the G3x and the various AoA systems), but in general you don’t see the sort of innovation that is present in larger or more dynamic markets, like CAT or even biz jets, especially for powerplants.*
I’m more skeptical on the actual airframe front that there is a lot for innovation to do, as subsonic aerodynamics haven’t really improved that much since the 1970s or whenever. To be sure, you can probably make some decent gains by switching to composites that can hold more complex shapes more accurately, and cleaning up on parasitic drag, but I don’t think the underlying airframes are that easy to beat, at least not without making a sacrifice somewhere else.
*In fairness, beating the existing design paradigm for an O-360 (air-cooled, direct drive, etc) is perhaps harder than it seems, as the failure of the various auto conversions suggests, because you have to add back in a gearbox or radiators or what have you. A Jabiru 2200 is not appreciably heavier or less efficient than a Rotax 912, for example. On the other hand, having auto-mixture or auto-spark advance seems like it shouldn’t be that hard, and some of the experimentals have that despite relatively small volumes. Whether the added complexity of auto-spark advance, etc, is worth the cost relative to a magneto is harder to say, but given how reliable and commonplace they are in cars, it still seems strange that we don’t have some sort of FADEC at least available for new builds. Also, direct injection? (And yes, a FADEC IO-360 would be a bit of an odd duck)
It is a great idea but I think that Marketing will do what they have always done: turbine → pressurisation. And then you will be looking at a big expensive plane. The PA46T is the smallest example. Attempts to build an unpressurised IFR TP tourer e.g. the Grob 140 have gone nowhere, which could be because Marketing is right in its assessment of buyer psychology. But there is also the poor fuel economy at sub-oxygen-mask levels, and a large % of “GA” IR holders refuse to use oxygen at all and it is often inconvenient for passengers, especially kids.
Peter wrote:
It is a great idea but I think that Marketing will do what they have always done: turbine → pressurisation.
And it’s a very valid argument. Having recently had several long x-country flights in a friend’s P210, I can attest to the game-changing difference a pressurized cabin makes.
It would be interesting to get fuel consumption on the Cessna 206 with a Soloy RR conversion at FL100, 180 poh and 160KTAS? Mileage similar to an MEP (Twin Comanche excepted) but on Jet A1.
https://www.soloy.com/8203soloy-mkii-turbine-206.html
Alternatively this alpha male Cessna 195 can fly airways on Mogas. But is mogas viable outside bits of Europe and the USA?
