Along with the solar constant, Hubble's constant and Planck's constant, there's one more universal truth: All aviation journalists are idiots. Or, at the very least, they're smug and self-satisfied malcontents. I'm bringing this up now because about a year ago, when Piper announced its new Matrix six-place cabin class airplane, a few of us sat around the table at AOPA in Hartford and opined how this thing was going to be a huge loser.

Who wants a gutted out Mirage? And after all, didn't Cessna stub its toe on the 335, a downscale, non-pressurized version of the 340? Yes, it did, but that was then—1980--this is now. What Piper realized and we didn't is that the six-place Saratoga series was losing its appeal and there was an entire class of step-up buyers from four-place Cirrus and Columbia models who wanted two more seats but not necessarily pressurization. So Piper trimmed a bunch of weight out of the Mirage and lowered the price by a third and—presto—a new model is born and it's selling well.

It's too soon to say how long the legs on the Matrix sales numbers will stretch, but Piper has a good start, according to Rick Durden, who did a report on this new airplane for Aviation Consumer. You can read a courtesy copy of it here.

Bottom line, after adding everything up, we like the airplane. Losing pressurization saves on weight and complexity and the performance is similar to the Mirage. Although we predicted owners wouldn't want to venture into the mid-teens sucking on a nose hose, it turns out they don't seem to mind it at all.

Aircraft companies, at least recently, haven't proven especially adept at mining niche markets. Or even mainstream markets for that matter, given the failure rate of start-up aircraft ventures. What Piper seems to have done is recognized a niche and realized it could fill it without the kind of over-the-top investment that kills so many aircraft projects. It's nice, for a change, to see the spreadsheet numbers actually come true.

Related Content:
Durden's Aviation Consumer Report

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As I sort through the e-mail from Monday's blog about hurricane preparedness in Florida—or lack of it—another storm is careening around the Caribbean and two or three more tropical waves are queued up east of Leewards. This season is shaping up like a do over of 2004.

For those who don't live along the Gulf coast, understanding why it's so enervating to plan an aircraft evacuation ahead of storm requires some explanation. I relocated our Mooney four times in 2004 and once in 2006. Those experiences taught me some lessons about decision-making and risk.

First, the notion that you have to wait until the weather gets too bad to fly before knowing where the storm will go is not really accurate. The National Hurricane Center has steadily reduced its track error in forecasts. In 2006, for example, the average 24-hour forecast track error was 58 miles, while the 48-hour track error was 112 miles. Those aren't quite take-it-to-the-bank numbers, but they're impressive. At 24 hours, even a slow moving storm—that's about 10 knots in these latitudes—is 240 miles away. Rare is the hurricane that produces consistently unflyable weather that far out. You can usually duck out around the bands, if there are any. Fast moving storms provide even greater margins.

So the decision-making process is sort of a rolling set of constantly changing variables, one of which is how confident you are in the NHC's track progs. And second, do you plan to move the airplane somewhere secure and return to your home or just let the storm pass and return later? If you decide to bolt early, you have to accept that you may be making a 236-mile error in judgment. (That's the average track error at 96 hours.) So be it. Make the decision and go, without recriminations, secure in the knowledge that any conservative decision is a good one.

Deciding where to go can be a challenge, more for Floridians than for other Gulf coast owners. Most storm tracks in Florida have a strong northerly component and because the peninsula of Florida is only about 150 miles wide, the no-brainer plan of flying 300 miles perpendicular to the predicted storm track rarely works. As a result, it's quite possible that you can move the airplane from an area the hurricane will skirt and into one it will devastate. This has happened and it's always a risk. So if you're moving an airplane out of Florida, really move it—well into Georgia or Alabama or along the Gulf coast. I took the Mooney as far as New Jersey once.

Moving an airplane to avoid a storm assumes that all of your basic prep is complete. If it isn't, the airplane is the least of your worries. The basics include house shuttered, cars secured, supplies stored, generator gassed up, pets cared for. Personally, I have all of this ready and waiting by March, so all I need is two hours to bolt up the shutters, then I can tend to the airplane and move it…or not. I have reason to be a little airplane centric and obsessively loss-prevention oriented. I toured Homestead Airport after Hurricane Andrew wiped it from the face of the planet in 1992. And not right after, either, but several weeks. There were piles of broken airplanes, shredded bits of aluminum and concrete pads that used to be hangars and a lot of shell-shocked former owners wandering around. One of them practically grasped me by the lapels and said that if I ever faced a looming hurricane, move the airplane, if practical. Losing it and his house had been traumatic and, he said, at least part of that loss could have been prevented.

Speaking of which, in my blog Monday, I wasn't clear about the Florida insurance industry's lax attitude toward loss prevention. Avemco's Jim Lauerman wrote to note that Avemco's losses from Category I hurricanes have been minor in the past decade so it has concentrated its efforts on the more meaningful aspect of loss prevention: accident avoidance. He's right, too. My beef with lack of loss prevention effort is aimed more at the property and casualty companies, especially in Florida. Still, I think aviation insurers could do more to raise the general consciousness of loss prevention and to at least encourage owners to consider hurricane flyouts by offering discounts or logistical support. A little money spent there could save millions in claim payouts. It would at least reorient thinking to favor loss prevention in general, which is something we have to do in this country.

A couple of readers took me to task for complaining about the Florida insurance industry's isolating risk to Florida and setting rates accordingly. The so-called "four pups" of Florida are separate companies formed by four major national insurers, the industry executives claiming that this keeps a big Florida hurricane from dragging the mother companies into bankruptcy. This gives readers outside Florida the idea that they are somehow "subsidizing" my easy-street, sunny lifestyle.

"In most of the post you complain that people don't take enough personal responsibility, yet you want policyholders in the rest of the country to subsidize your decision to live in sunny Florida? How do you square those two beliefs?" wrote one reader.

Well that one is easy. It might surprise you to learn that in 2006 (and likely in 2007, too), First Floridian, a pup of Traveler's Indemnity, paid a $21 million dividend to its parent and generally had record profits from its Florida operation. So whom is subsidizing whom? This, by the way, occurred in the same year that Nationwide Florida—another pup—asked regulators for a 71.4 percent increase in premiums for its Florida customers. And rates are only part of the issue. The larger problem is cherry picking—insurers have dropped vast numbers of customers in favor of minimal risk properties that they can then extract large premiums from. When I was dropped by my company, they didn't even take note of the thousands of dollars I had invested specifically in hurricane hardening.

So what you've got is a one-way safety valve in which Florida residents pay usurious premiums that funnel nice profits out of the state while the companies are insulated from loss by the convenience of letting the pups fail if a major storm strikes. (That they haven't done this yet is no guarantee that they won't.) It may be fashionably cynical to say, "well, you moved to Florida, so you deal with it." But there's a national interest here. You could say the same thing about New Orleans. But if you're a farmer in the Midwest, you have an interest, because the port of New Orleans ships your grain to overseas markets. Where do you think the people who work in that port live? Do you heat with oil in Des Moines? Lots of it comes up the Mississippi from New Orleans. Do you like orange juice and fresh veggies during the winter? Guess where that stuff comes from? That's why a national risk pool makes more sense than isolating Florida or any other state.

And this is why localizing the risk pool is a broken system. According to J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of American and a former Texas insurance regulator, long-term loss rates in Florida are only 2 percent above the national average, a trivial difference. Insurance companies do face risks of major payouts for an Andrew or a Katrina, but just as we expect Florida residents to plan for and protect themselves from storms, so should we expect the same of insurance companies. Hunter thinks—and many agree—that the Florida market is a gravy train when losses are low and hardly the money sink the industry claims when they aren't.

That's not an argument that a homeowner who lives in Tampa should pay the same premiums as someone in Dayton. Clearly, Florida homeowners represent more risk and should pay higher rates. But there's nothing new about that. Insurance rates have always been regional and competitive. What is new is the distortion of the market by the major insurance companies whose sky-is-falling shrieks convinced the state to allow them to set up the Florida-only companies in the first place.

What's needed most is insurance company managers who can look far enough beyond their own noses to see past the third quarter and catch of a glimpse of what's called good corporate citizenship. Like any businesses, they have responsibilities to their shareholders, but also to their customers to provide products and services that are affordable and yield profits over the long haul. When they distort the market to drive short-term profits, corporate citizenship is the last phrase I'd use to describe the results.

UPDATE: SATURDAY, AUGUST 30, 4:30 P.M. As Gustav pounds Cuba and sets course for the central Gulf of Mexico, it's interesting to consider where you could evacuate an airplane from now in Florida if you had to. With the storm due to be abeam of Key West to the west at 8 a.m. Sunday, you could still make it out of Key West at this hour, although you'd need good radar to navigate the thunderstorms found in some of the spriral bands. I'm a little surprised Key West is only under a tropical storm warning and that no evacuations are under way. Key West will be on the northeast side of the storm and it wouldn't take much of an eastward jink to see high winds on the island.

Here on the west coast of Florida, we've had one powerful band with gusts and thunderstorms. But there are still flyable routes out of Florida. Twelve hours from now, I wouldn't bet on it, even though we'll be 250 miles from Gustav's center.

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When you live in Florida, you tend to become obsessive about weather radar. On a normal summer day, I check into WeatherTap a half-dozen times a day just to see what's popping. (Usually, that's a lot.) For the past week, I've been watching Tropical Storm Fay slog slowly across the state and I'll concede some disappointment that she missed us entirely. I shuttered up the house and was standing by for mobile homes, dumpsters and my neighbor's garden shed to go tumbling down the street. Alas, it was not to be.

This got me thinking about how little hurricane preparation Florida residents actually do, including aviation interests. You would think that with the National Hurricane Center blasting out warnings five times a day and the media consumed with reporting on the approaching storm, that people would undertake basic preparations like food, water and flashlights. But many don't. In 2006, after Hurricane Wilma clipped south Florida and whacked the Miami area, people were lining up the next day for FEMA-provided bottled water. To me, this represents such a fundamental lack of survival instinct that I don't see how such people actually feed themselves.

You'd think that it would be advisable to move threatened airplanes out of the storm's path, but most owners don't. The majority seem content leaving their airplanes in tiedowns or in hangars that may or may not survive the storm and the common refrain is, "That's what insurance is for."

This attitude makes me crazy, for it's the very embodiment of a dismaying combination of ducking responsibility while expecting someone else to bail you out of a jam you almost certainly had the wherewithal to avoid. It's what we used to call a "welfare" attitude. And it's one reason that Florida has, in some respects, become unlivable. Most visitors to Florida are shocked to learn that insuring a home against hurricane wind damage in this state is practically impossible. At best, many insurance companies have dropped customers without warning, in the middle of a policy period, or, worse, fled the state entirely. It's a major crisis here, aggravated by the tanking of the real estate market.

Part of this is due to the insurance industry's boneheaded and irresponsible practice of isolating Florida as its own market rather than conflating the risk into a national pool. Further, few if any of these companies practice proactive loss prevention. I called our insurer just after we moved here and asked for a list of hurricane loss prevention strategies. No one returned the call. A year later, the company dropped us as a customer and left the Florida market. The ugly reality is that it doesn't take much of a hurricane to wipe out the insurers in Florida, sending them scurrying for the Georgia line.

Factor two in this equation is that homeowners, builders and local governments do little more than the basics to encourage or force hardening of buildings against hurricane wind damage. Conceding that building codes have gotten stricter, they're not strict enough, in my view. The sad fact is that a hurricane slices through the state, smashes the crap out of a wide swath of real estate—to the surprise of those who are lined up the next morning for bottled water—and what do we do? Rather than wising up and building the hurricane-hardened structures we know how to build, we cheap it out and put up more of same crackerboxes, the long term survival plan being essentially the hope that it won't happen again.

The aviation aspect of this is that the insurance companies don't encourage loss prevention, either. Rather than get involved with active programs to relocate airplanes or offer discounts to owners who do it on their own, they're willing to take the losses and adjust premiums accordingly. If the overall P & L is looking good, why bother, right? Our friends at AVEMCO explain the reasoning in this week's podcast with editor Russ Niles.

While I see the point, I also think this is short sighted and encourages owners to avoid confronting their personal responsibility to protect their property against loss. Insurance companies measure risk with big picture actuarials and if a run-of-the-mill storm like Fay chews up a few airplanes, it gets lost in a rounding error. But four years ago, Hurricane Charlie destroyed 150 airplanes at just one airport and, increasingly, it's not hard to see how a major Florida hurricane could wipe out 1000 airframes that are just sitting there waiting to be shredded.

What most policyholders don't get—except maybe in Florida—is that it doesn't take much loss to see premiums escalate or to have companies abandon markets entirely. But the larger issue isn't the losses themselves, which the aviation insurers can probably absorb because there are enough of them to distribute the risk. The larger problem is that when insurance companies avoid active loss prevention, it sends the wrong message to policy holders because it suggests to them that they don't have a dog in the fight. It encourages the notion that insurance is somehow a substitute for planning, for preparation, for the kind of forethought required to survive.

In short, it encourages victimhood. And before you know it, you're standing in line for a bottle of water.

Related Content:
Avemco Insurance's Mike Adams offer hurricane damage prevention tips in this podcast.

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So, it's probably not on anyone's speed dial but there are a few aviation companies who might consider dropping a dime on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to round out their business plans. They'll have to excuse her if she doesn't get back to them right away since she's trying to keep Russia and the U.S. from clipping each other about the ears over a dust-up between Georgia and a breakaway state known to its people as Abkhazia.

In case you haven't been following the news, the U.S. wants Russia to leave Georgia alone and Russia wants Georgia to leave Abkhazia alone and the whole thing came to a head because some Russian diplomat blew a tire and couldn't change it himself. As I write this the Russians have troops and tanks and guns in Georgia and despite some kind of agreement they're looking like they might hang around awhile and, if necessary, sink a few more ships. I wish I was making it up.

Then there's the Russian general who casually mentioned that Poland could become a parking lot for allowing U.S. missile defense systems within its borders. Makes you want to put your head between your knees.

With oil money (and God knows what else) fueling a boom in private aviation there, it's only natural that companies would seek opportunity in Russia. After all, Russia has seen the light and has free enterprise and all that oil money (and God knows what else).

So, the rooted-in-the-West companies like Cessna, Bombardier, Hawker Beechcraft etc. have been testing the market, finding some success there and expanding in the region to meet demand. Seems reasonable and rational. But there are a few companies whose future seems at least partially dependent on a neighborly exchange of goods and services as if all the nuke talk, the tanks and sunken ships were secondary to the ordained right of making money.

First, there's Epic Aviation. They hope to build their twin-jet Elite in Tblisi, the capital of Georgia. Well real estate prices are probably pretty low right now, especially compared to the costs the might have faced in Calgary, Alta., which, while it might have expensive dirt, has a remarkable absence of Russian tanks in the vicinity.

Then there's Eclipse. A Russian factory appears to be a major part of the plan to make the company profitable but maybe Roel Pieper, et. al. should investigate friction stir welded tanks instead. Seems to be a market...

The most confused aviation company executives on the planet may be at AAI Acquisitions in Denver. They're the Americans who run the Russian-backed company that took over Adam Aircraft for pennies on the dollar. There are some good people there and the A700 is a nice jet, but it'll be interesting to see if business trumps politics (and God knows what else).

Condi, if you have a minute...

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I've had this longstanding theory that when people get around airplanes, their brains turn to the consistency of my dear departed mother's much-loved polenta. (That's corn meal mush for those of you deprived of upbringing in an Italian-American household.) And if there's a computer spreadsheet nearby, so much as a shard of ability to think critically evaporates and brain activity devolves to limp-home autonomics, like breathing and pulse.

And despite more than a century of experience, we as an industry just can't seem to learn that the cost of building an airplane is always wildly underestimated, the number of units it will sell is always wildly overestimated and the time required to build it comes to rest somewhere between the two. But airplanes rarely get built faster than estimated, although Cessna's vaunted Citation machinery can claim to have done it. Cessna's polenta is way above the industry average, I guess.

This came to mind when we were covering the much hyped Oshkosh rollout of the Icon amphibious LSA. No less a personage than Vern Raburn-who is lesser, I suppose, having departed Eclipse-took the dais to inform the aviation press that this little beauty won't bring just hundreds into the general aviation fold and not thousands either, but hundreds of thousands. Given the experience of Eclipse, you just wanna scream, are you listening?

I can say, without fear of being wrong, that the Icon will never sell hundreds of thousands. It will not sell tens of thousands, either. And this has nothing to do with the merits of the design or the people running the show or the high-priced designers engaged to dream it up. It has to do with the twin realities that the vast majority of aircraft startups fail because their principles simply can't grasp that making airplanes remains a cottage industry. Airplanes are built with hammers and punches, cars with robots. Small airplane and large volume haven't belonged in the same sentence since 1978.

Where I'm going with this is the persistent notion that somehow, the light aircraft industry is screwing up because it can't build a $50,000 to $60,000 new airplane that everyone can afford to buy and fly. I get out quite a bit and visit the places where airplanes are made and I gotta say, I just don't see where these businesses are monuments to inefficiency. They build stuff one-off by hand because that's what the investment and market volume will support. Building airplanes is a constant struggle between going bankrupt because you invested too much money or going bankrupt because you didn't invest enough.

Take the Legend Cub, for example, now selling north of $110,000, nicely equipped. I love the thing-it's one of my favorite LSAs. Yet I hear people complain that this is too much money for a new airplane and that Legend should somehow knock it down to $60,000. This strikes me as ludicrous. The Legend is a well-built, well-considered airplane that, despite being a J-3 knockoff, is a thoroughly modern airplane. I suspect the factory is doing what every other airplane factory is-- trying to match the investment to the market volume while controlling production costs. I hope they're making a profit, but I doubt if they're printing money. For any airplane maker, the wolf has a permanent lair outside the door.

The only rational way to look at any of this, in my view, is to accept the idea that playing the flying game just isn't going to cheap. Ever. The most spectacular proof of this theory is Eclipse's stunning failure to produce the sub-million dollar jet that was going change the world. With that in mind, don't get steamed at the industry for not delivering cheap airplanes. They can't. They're not going to. Get over it.

The route to affordable flying is to structure the activity so you're insulated from the high-dollar spikes. I don't care if autogas costs $6 a gallon because I ride a motorcycle and a bicycle and don't use much of it. The corollary for airplane use is to get into a club or a multi-member partnership that splits the fixed costs into bite-sized fractions. Or buy something old. I've never understood the sentiment of sole ownership for a dreadfully expensive thing that's used 100 hours a year, if that. For those who want that experience, it's available, it will just cost a lot more. If you've got the income to fund, say, $1,500 to $2,500 a month in airplane expenses, this discussion is academic.

For the rest of us, flying remains accessible and affordable, even if sole ownership isn't. But cheap? Never.

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