With the retirement of Simon Caldecott becoming effective last Friday, Piper Aircraft announced yesterday its board of directors had appointed John Calcagno acting president and CEO, effective immediately. Calcagno most recently served as Piper’s chief financial officer where he oversaw all financial reporting, treasury and cash management, information technology and enterprise resource planning. Caldecott was president and CEO for 10 years and oversaw significant increases in production at Vero Beach, Florida-based Piper Aircraft.
A U.S. Air Force veteran, Calcagno began his corporate career with PricewaterhouseCoopers. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Accountancy from Southern Illinois University with a minor emphasis in Political Science and is a Certified Public Accountant. His career includes stints with The Acerra Consortium, Alltel (Supply) Communications Products, Coca-Cola and C.R. Bard, before joining Piper 11 years ago. His areas of expertise include finance, operations, distribution and sales.
“I know that I speak for everyone at Piper Aircraft,” Calcagno said, “in thanking Simon for his leadership and tireless dedication to the company. We have an exceptionally talented team at Piper Aircraft that is focused on taking decisive action to transform the business, continuing to innovate our products in new and diverse ways, and unlocking future growth opportunities.”
Has anyone told Piper management about all the PA-28s and PA-32s that are grounded by the latest spar inspection A.D. 2020-26-16?
https://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf/0/e7c6578b69cdce7d8625865e005b20fe/$FILE/2020-26-16.pdf
Looking forward to Mr. Calcagno opinion on the legacy Piper aircraft and how they’re going to support them. Mr. Caldecott was silent.
They’ll “support” them by happily selling them new spars…eventually. We’re in line for a new one, and who knows how long it will be until we get the spar. Then it’s 5 weeks for the wing repair.
Is anybody doing voluntary eddy inspections on the spar carry-through assembly?
Beyond the bolt holes called out in the AD?
We do plan on doing voluntary ECIs on the other two club planes, and at least two other people I know will be doing the same on their aircraft. The aircraft we inspected was only done because the original logbooks were lost in a fire, but otherwise it would not have been required to be inspected.
Yes, in addition to the holes in the spar (part of the wing); the holes in the mating carry-through (part of the fuselage). Just curious.
Since the AD has the ECI done with the wings still attached, it does include the spar carry-through holes too.
Gary:
Where were your failures?
Forward outboard bolt hole in the left spar, on the bottom of the spar. It definitely would not have been detectable without the ECI. My question is how long it was there, and how long it might have been there before failing.
Uh oh, another financial person in charge of an engineering company.
Ditto. And in consideration of the comments above on the AD, this doesn’t look good. “If we can’t make money on the AD, then we will focus our attention elsewhere. Owner satisfaction doesn’t appear anywhere in our financials.”
Quotation marks? Really?
When did they become an engineering company? Piper? At best they are an assembler and really poor one at that.