Aero: Diesels Finally Get Higher TBRs

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In the early days of automotive diesels, stinky and slow were joined permanently to the concept of diesel cars. Not anymore. Driving on the autobahn yesterday in my crummy little rental Twingo, an Audi blew past me doing a buck and half and it was a turbodiesel that European drivers have come to love.

I wish I could say aerodiesel development cycles have been equally swift, but they’ve tended to move on geologic time scales. So it was only with great restraint Wednesday that I kept from shouting “finally!” when Continental announced higher TBRs for its four-cylinder diesels, the CD-135 and CD-155. I’ll get to the economics in a moment. Suffice to say I’ve been waiting on tenterhooks since Frank Thielert told me in the summer of 2005 that the four-cylinder diesel would be at a TBR of 1800 hours by the end of the year. Ah, what an innocent time it was.

Reality set in, as it always does, and more than a decade later, we finally see the high replacement times that have, at least partially, kept this technology from maturing and expanding. So the question now is will this expand the diesel market which has been, heretofore, tepid at best. When it bought into diesel in 2013, Continental was angling for a 20 percent market share within five years. By my calculation, diesel in total has half that at the moment.

Let’s run the numbers briefly. With Wednesday’s announcement, the TBRs—time between replacement—on all of Continental’s four-cylinder diesels rise to 2100 hours. Taking the worst case, the 155-hp CD-155 that previously had a 1200-hour TBR and costs $42,925 to replace, the hourly engine reserve cost drops from $35.77 to $20.44. Recall that these engines still require replacement gearboxes. That interval has been raised from 600 hours to 1200, so the engine needs just one $3191 gearbox on the way to TBR rather than two. That saves another non-trivial expense, at least on the CD-135, which had a 1500-hour TBR. I’ll run more detailed numbers later, but this is a huge shift in diesel’s favor.

Now it remains to be seen if it will be enough to ignite sales. We know OEMs other than Cessna and Piper have been flying if not offering diesels. Will the industry be able to get buyers to pay close enough attention to the economics on a $400,000-plus airframe to tilt toward diesel? We’ll see. I’m not so sure compellingly lower operating economics are enough to do the trick, given how expensive the base airplane has become. It’s like not buying a $240,000 Ferrari Italia because you hate putting $2.75 premium gas in the tank.

Continental’s Rhett Ross said that Cessna has finally decided to push the button and take orders for its Skyhawk diesel and I’m sure they’ll find buyers, especially in Europe. What they really need is a big U.S. institutional sale and maybe now with higher TBRs, they’ll get one. But will it just cannibalize sales of avgas Skyhawks? My guess is yes.

Hand It to Honda

Aviation being an international business and all, you never quite know how cultural and language variations will cause people to react to questions from the press that we consider quite natural in the U.S. For example, at the HondaJet press conference here at Aero on Wednesday, CEO Michimasa Fujino was asked how much the HondaJet certification project had cost, in total.

“I don’t remember,” he quipped, getting a laugh from the reporters. I’d have expected a more culturally circumspect route to a polite no comment. I think Fujino has been around aviation and the U.S. long enough for a certain wry fatalism to have rubbed off. Who can blame him? Fujino has spent almost three decades of his life—he’s 54 but looks 30—overseeing the HondaJet from conception to birth. The industrialization/certification alone took 10 years. By GA standards, much less the gotta-have-it-by-next-quarter demand of other industries, that’s a lifetime plus. Any venture capital investor would be screaming for some ROI. But that’s not Honda, which funded the project internally. Richard Aboulafia at Teal Group has said the glacial pace of the HondaJet cert means the project will likely never turn a profit. But then that wasn’t the point; building a jewel that allowed Honda to stake a claim in the world of jet transportation was.

The general press has gushed over the HondaJet as being revolutionary and some coverage has hinted that it’s a market changer. But not really. The company has about 100 orders on the books and while that’s certainly impressive, it’s not a major market presence and probably won’t be for some time, if ever.

When asked about production rates to fill those orders, Fujino said the Greensboro, North Carolina, factory can produce up to three airplanes a month, but would eventually like to reach 100 a year. But in the same breath, he cautioned that this will take “a very long time.” It’s always refreshing when someone in aviation is brutally honest about the realities of serial production when we’ve grown accustomed to people who aren’t.

In a way unusual to the world of business jets, the HondaJet is, more than anything, a tribute to one guy’s patience and determination. Fujino was given a unique opportunity at Honda and he saw it through.

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