Cub Crafters’ Winning Formula
It hasn’t been based on building cheap airplanes. But the company still has strong sales in the LSA market. It’s about to show off a new model.
Wrapping up a marathon 10 days of travel this week, I was happy to get my mitts on and actually fly a real airplane. Not a drone operated from some air-conditioned trailer a half a world away or something powered by batteries that lack capacity or, more likely, something that exists only in a PowerPoint presentation. This blatant and unprovoked commission of aviation occurred at Cub Crafters in the hilly plains of south central Washington.
Cub Crafters, as you probably know, has carved a unique niche for itself in the GA market. Owner Jim Richmond started with a Cub restoration business, plying the Alaska trade where the Super Cub remains a stalwart in the commercial bush flying business, prized for its generous payload and robust construction. Cub Crafters' business quite naturally evolved into actually manufacturing new, certified aircraft and although most of us may think of the company as a builder of light sport airplanes--the Carbon Cub--the factory is a proper Part 23 manufacturing facility. They certified and continue to sell the Top Cub. Cub Crafters President Randy Lervold had invited me to come have a look at their newest product, which will be announced in June. I spent some time flying it and although a press embargo restricts me from revealing any details, I think the airplane will create quite a stir when it's unveiled. You'll be able to get a good look at it at AirVenture and I suggest you take the time to do so.
Having spent a day and half flying the airplane and touring the factory, I had a moment or two to consider this question: Are the modern tools available to designers yielding better airplanes than ever? And are production techniques more efficient than ever? Although the answer is not a universal yes, it's a general yes. As I mentioned in a blog on Diamond's new DA62, that airplane is as uncompromised as it's reasonable to expect from any manufacturer. Diamond didn't corner cut to hold a particular price point and my impression of the new Cub Crafters airplane is that the company followed a similar strategy. Like Diamond, they appear to have focused everything they've learned in 30 years in the airplane business and married it with modern design technology to build a thing that's about as competent and unblemished as is possible to do in 2016.
During my interviews with Lervold and CC's marcomm guy, John Whitish, I tried to gain some sense of the investment required to bring a new model to market and despite my insistent bracketing around specific numbers, they politely demurred. Suffice to say that when I opened the bidding at $2 million, I got a polite laugh and it's not because I've overshot the estimate. And rules number one and two in aircraft development are that it always costs more and takes longer than anyone plans. Just the paper shuffle alone for a certified product requires multiple thousands of pages of documentation and if you page through all that data, you'd be hard-pressed to measure value for the customer in terms of a higher-quality--or a safer--product delivered. That's not to say that neither Part 23 nor the ASTM standards for light sports aren't rooted in sensible design and manufacturing processes, because they certainly are. It's the level of niggly detail that runs the costs up and delays the project, preventing the companies from pulling in revenue on that big investment they've made. That's one reason why the long-awaited Part 23 revision is being anticipated as a potential market changer. I've said before that I'm skeptical of the expectations for the Part 23 revision, although I think it will at least help hold the line on the rate of cost escalation.
Ignoring the costs for a moment, the actual design quality of airplanes is, I think, better than ever. Lervold told me structural efficiency of new airplanes continues to improve because digital design tools exist to build structures that are just strong enough, without throwing in extra tubes or brackets where they aren't needed. I'm sure in the days when the original Cub was designed using slide rules, the builders added extra structure as a safety margin ... just because. Lervold told me one other thing that has nearly revolutionized flight test revisions is the simple POV camera, like a GoPro. These can be attached to any point on the airframe to film a tufted surface in flight to see what the air is actually doing rather than guessing at it. It's literally like a flying wind tunnel. This makes design tweaking faster and more effective and, I'm convinced, delivers that last measure of performance confirmation that defines the difference between acceptable and exceptional.
On the shop floor, CNC technology certainly offers labor-saving efficiency and it allows companies to pull in-house what they used to outsource. Lervold showed me a complex machined fitting for the control stick that was certainly done on CNC. Shipping that stuff outside gives all the margin to the outside vendor and that's not a formula for profitable success. The established trend in most low-volume, high-mix manufacturing is insourcing.
A few years ago, when manufacturers were trying to produce cheaper LSAs in hopes of stimulating volume, Jim Richmond told me the company looked at trying to build an $85,000 light sport. They concluded that it was a path to big losses and now Cub Crafters plies the upper end of the LSA price strata and with good success. They're building about 60 airplanes a year and have capacity for more than that. The company is growing modestly and is expanding its footprint on the Yakima Airport. In a market that seems determined to continue withering, that's encouraging. The company's new airplane, I predict, will find enough buyers to keep the trend perking.
