What Customers Say They Want vs. What They Really Want

I've been covering and writing about businesses of various kinds for a long time and I'm trying to recall if executives always coveted buzz phrases they way they do now. Probably they have, but I just found it less obnoxious when I was younger. (Now, everything is obnoxious. Didn't I warn you about being on my lawn?)

One buzz phrase making the rounds a decade ago was "voice of the customer." It gave businesses cover for shoving products out the door under the guise of listening to what their customers supposedly wanted. OK, that's an unfairly cynical view, but I warned you about my lawn.

Now, there's a new phrase making the rounds, which Mike Kraft told me about when I was at Lycoming last month. It's DITLOC for-wait for it-a day in the life of the customer. Actually going out and flying with some customers is how Lycoming learned that even though the industry had convinced itself that single-lever power levers were the coming rage, reality in the field showed that this was secondary to users who want less maintenance and more reliability.

I'll look at that later in a future blog, but for the moment I'm thinking it applies to Sporty's idea of what it's calling the Cessna172Lite. It's another version of a refurbed Skyhawk, but one that's pitched at the low end to represent an affordable trainer for flight schools. Affordable by Sporty's standard is renting for $99 an hour, with adequate margin for the school to turn a little profit and keep the airplane maintained.

Just for reference, a recent survey I did of the flight school rental market revealed Cessna Skyhawk rental rates between $99 and $225. Newer airplanes command higher rates as do airplanes based in urban areas. By their own admission, flight schools say those $99 to $110 Skyhawks aren't exactly queens of the fleet, if you get my drift. They're neither expensive to buy nor maintain. Some schools told me they have newer re-start Hawks on the line and a few had G1000 models.

The schools were ambivalent about wanting more glass panel airplanes for two reasons: They're more expensive to buy and many instructors don't want to start students in glass airplanes. That makes sense to me. More telling, when I asked these schools what their upward limit for an airplane purchase was, almost all of them gave me the same number: About $150,000.

That will buy an older G1000 Hawk; just. Sporty's has one on its rental line, a 2005. They told me the economics aren't favorable to replace that with a newer one so they tacked in the opposite direction. The 172Lite is a mid-1970s Skyhawk with a fresh engine, spiffed up paint and a new interior. The panel can be described as austere-like even below Greek austerity austere. It's got a six pack, a comm radio and a transponder and enough unused panel real estate to make a Garmin sales rep break down and weep. The asking price is $138,000. Here's a picture of the panel.

But will it find a market sweet spot? We'll see. I'd certainly have no complaints about instructing in it, although I'd bring along a tablet with GPS and a moving map for position awareness in those areas where airspace is a concern. Otherwise, it's just like a Cessna 150 with more leg and shoulder room. I've long since given up pondering whether incrementally lower prices will attract more would-be pilots and it's not entirely clear to me that higher prices drive them off. I do know that flight schools like to have four-place airplanes on the line that double as trainers and rentals. It provides flexibility.

My thing is the questionable notion of plopping a new student into a glass cockpit for the first, oh, 10 or 15 hours. Several instructors told me they don't like doing this much, although some said it really doesn't matter what you put new students in. If they're going to stick with the training, they adapt to the complexity and push on. I don't think there's any useful data on this. One instructor I know in Naples said he basically insulates new students from the G1000 for five hours before introducing simple tasks, such as tuning the radios.

To me, this is evidence of conceptual failure and that DITLOC I was talking about earlier. If your customers have to seriously adapt what they do to suit the machine rather than the other way around, you have a problem. And I'm wondering if at least some segments of the training world aren't coming full circle and reacting to this. I'm not going all Luddite here, but to me, simpler-to-operate avionics are a desirable thing for new students. And that doesn't rule out glass, it just rules out big, expensive, complex glass of the type experienced owners seemed drawn to like moths to a bug zapper. Come to think of it, the odor after a few years of ownership-faint whiff of burnt cash--is kinda similar.

In a moment of hyperactive motivation or irrational exuberance-not sure which-I did something aviation related over the weekend that I haven't in six years: a skydive. I was sidelined by a shoulder injury in 2009 and meant to get back to jumping after I recovered. One year led to another and…zap. Six years?

I think long layoffs from any activity affect you in different ways and as you get older, maybe those effects are unpredictable. I wasn't quite prepared for how emotional it felt. Any skydive is a blend of intense excitement, anticipation and a little fear, too. After more than half a decade of not feeling that, sliding the Otter's door open and sticking a foot over the sill brought back an intensity I hadn't expected. It reminded me of why I got into the sport in the first place. (Forty two years ago this summer.)

Most of the skills in skydiving are all but autonomic. I'm not gonna forget where the handles are or to cinch down my helmet. But just to dust things off, I did a hop and pop and immediately learned not everything is baked in. My leg straps were just a tad too loose and I slid down in the harness an inch too far on opening and oops-chin hits the chest strap. Note to self…

My only immediate concern was landing the damn thing. No worries about getting killed, mind you, or even injured. I just didn't want to look like a complete tyro. I needn't have worried. I did a perfect standup, stumbled on some mushy ground and crashed to my knees. It looked vaguely intentional and was far enough from the spectator line not to reveal the divots.

Landing a parachute is both similar to landing an airplane and nothing at all like it. You set up an approach into the wind, time the flare with brakes and gently touch your Nikes. But you only get once chance; there's no go around opportunity and no instructor to mutter helpful tips. My second landing required a Usain Bolt runout, but no stumbling this time. Not enough brake. I'll dial in the third one.

My long-time friend Mike Woods suggested I join his group for a 17-way formation in the afternoon. Hey, why diddle around with any more baby jumps. I'm back! Sensing my hesitation, he said, "Dude, same air as always. Just do what you always did." Right he was. The skill to scoot around the sky to get where you want to be must be autonomic. I slid into my slot with no drama.

A six-year layoff was long enough to allow some DZ disruption to take place. For manifesting on a load, we used to buy paper tickets and hand them in at the ticket window. Now it's all done with a smartphone app from the comfort of the packing mat or the snack bar. Kinda cool.

Second, GoPro cameras. When my hiatus started, GoPros were barely out there; few used them for skydiving. Now everyone has one mounted on a helmet. Where the old-school way of evaluating a skydive was a single camera flyer above the formation, now there are five or six inside it. So the debrief is looking at five different camera angles that tend to be chaotic with none a complete picture. I liked the old way better. But I'm still putting a GoPro on my helmet, if just to catch my next face plant landing.

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