Mooney’s decision to rethink the M10 reminds me that I’ve seen this movie before. As we mentioned in today’s coverage, the company apparently realizes that the trainer market isn’t—and will likely never be—robust enough to support a major investment in a new aircraft. And that’s likely to be true no matter what the price point is, no matter how creative the avionics are, no matter how little fuel it burns and no matter how much marketeers like to believe a burning desire to fly consumes the heart of 1.3 billion Chinese citizens.
So where to from here? As Mooney CEO Vivek Saxena said in today’s video coverage, the company is now pushing the project toward the next-generation piston aircraft. But what is that? Is it getting too late to think of it as a piston or should we be thinking about electric propulsion instead? My view is that we’re betwixt and between. It’s too early to invest heavily and expect a reasonable return on an electric airplane, although a hybrid like Pipistrel is developing may be more realistic.
Could a new model achieve success with an entirely new piston engine of some kind? I’m skeptical, because I don’t know what that would be. Despite advancements in piston technology, aircraft engines remain constrained by power-to-weight considerations and a duty cycle that requires them to operate at 70 percent power. Diesels have made a dent in operating economy, but just a dent. They haven’t rewritten either performance or operating cost rules.
With the revised Part 23 nearly a reality, certification costs are supposed to be lower, but it’s unrealistic to think they’ll be sufficiently lower to make the difference between a $500,000 airplane and a $250,000 airplane. Not gonna happen. The best we can hope for is certification hoops that speed the process and maybe allow more creative options to sneak into the design mix.
So whatever Mooney has cooking, it’s not going to be easy to figure it out and bring it to market, no matter how much we think the market is ready for such things.
A Bigger Show
Sun ‘n Fun director Lites Leenhouts told us Tuesday morning that this year’s event has a record number of vendors and that 85 of them are new to the show. He also said all of them were aviation related and that’s good news. But maybe there weren’t quite enough newbies to squeeze out those nice ladies in Hangar B offering eyelifts. Not that I couldn’t maybe use one, but I’m just sayin.’
It’s impossible to say how many people aren’t here who otherwise would have been because of the perfect wall of weather that hung out all day over the entire northern part of the Florida peninsula. It was probably a 100-mile wide band of showers and thunderstorm that’s a case study in training from west to east. I’m writing this at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday and it’s still stewing out there. Better luck tomorrow to anyone waiting on the storms.
Auto traffic this morning was as dense as usual, with traffic backed up all the way to County Line Road. Here, I’ll cue my annual standing plea for Sun ‘n Fun to (a) fix this traffic snarl and (b) move the press center back up to show center, where it belongs. Probably a better chance of President Trump lifting the TFR over Palm Beach than the latter.
