New Age Manufacturing At Mooney

When I tour around to report on airplane projects, I have basically two reactions and having the imagination of a turnip, these are consistent. The first is wide-eyed wonderment at the audacity of it all; building machines that lift and hurl themselves through the atmosphere with people in them. The second, upon realizing the staggering cost and difficulty of doing this, is a barely controllable urge to find the nearest bed, crawl under it and curl up in a fetal ball. While I understand what animates the great industrial moguls of any age, I could never be one.

The latest such project I've gotten a glimpse of is Mooney's new M10T trainer initiative underway in a non-descript hangar complex in Chino, California. We've reported on the basics of this and even though Mooney is rapidly filling out the details, it won't have a flyable proof of concept until late summer or later this year. So it's not possible to evaluate the efficacy of the design. Give us a year or two on that. And note that entering the trainer market, where margins have always been low, presents a challenging business case.

But how they're going about it is interesting. As you know, Mooney is well capitalized from the Chinese interests who bought it in 2013 and while I wouldn't call the spending lavish, it's not a shoestring, either. Some of the investment is going into intensive CAD-CAM work and CFD—computational fluid dynamics, the virtual wind tunnels designers have been using for years to sort out the aero before going to the real wind tunnel or cutting metal or shaping glass. This isn't the first time this technology has been applied to single-engine aircraft, but Mooney COO Tom Bowen, whom I've know for years, told me this is the most intensive use of it he's ever seen on a light GA project. Which explains why all the action in Chino is happening at computer screens in the offices and not that much (yet) in the large but mostly empty hangar.

Interestingly, even ahead of locking down the final details or even flying the airplane, the engineers are busy working on parts diagrams and supply-chain problems, assembly instructions and future maintenance issues. Many of the young engineers come from mainstream aerospace experience with companies like Boeing or Northrop Grumman and know their way around design suites like Solidworks or Catia. The former is not commonly used in light aircraft work, although it's a staple in the defense industry. It has a plug-in called Composerthat allows design engineers and detailers to create an animation with in-depth instructions for the technician who actually has to assemble the part.

It should be obvious why this is important. Airplanes—or any complex manufactured thing—are nothing but single steps arrayed in a logical path that leads to the completed object. Anyone who has done serial production will tell you that the order of those steps is critical and getting them wrong can cascade throughout the process, costing time and money and eating into what are, increasingly, slimmer margins. In modern manufacturing, the degree to which something can be built virtually before it's built literally impacts both economics and quality. The days of working it out with a hammer and file on the bench are waning, although maybe they're not gone entirely. One of Mooney's techs showed me a three-dimensional rudder detail in which a torque tube with a rod end penetrated a solid member rather than nestling into the fork that was supposed to capture it. "This technology isn't perfect," he said, working on a revised drawing. But better to catch that now than when ship one starts down the line.

Every new airplane project that comes out of the ground represents another opportunity to reset the clock on production economics. Mooney's is different only by degree, I'd say, in that it has a realistic design and the capital and apparent will to apply the best production economics it can find. By "realistic" design I mean that the M10T isn't a great innovative leap. It's not going to be built out of unobtanium by robots programmed from India or China. The design has been optimized for safety, speed and style, with economy being a subset of speed. The construction isn't too dissimilar from what Cirrus and Diamond are doing; the engines are proven diesels from Continental, albeit in need of longer TBRs. The avionics are Garmin G1000s. But it's a literal order of magnitude different from what Mooney has been building. Tom Bowen told me the metal M20 line has 60,000 rivets and 3500 parts; the all-composite M10 has 350 parts. I suspect when we see it in the final version, the M10 series will have well-considered features related to maintainability, something the M20 always lacked. (Just ask an avionics tech who has to work behind the panel. Hell, ask me...)

With that degree of simplification and with all the potent technology Mooney is applying to the M10T, could its price be the great game changer some think the industry could produce if it would just wise up and simplify design and automate production? I'm happy to report Mooney isn't saying yet. I'm happy about that because so many aircraft and aviation products have been introduced with unrealistic price points that fail to sustain, causing the company to either fold or price itself out of the market.

"The one thing I learned is to notbe too hasty in announcing the prices before you figure out what it really costs to build it," Tony Parker, Mooney VP for product development, told me. Parker learned that lesson at the doctoral level as head of engineering at Eclipse, which made mistaken assumptions about production economics Parker is determined not to repeat at Mooney. That's the nice thing about clean sheet designs; if you can't rewrite the laws of physics you can at least re-litigate them in a new court.

Nor will Mooney be making assumptions about what may or may not be in the revised FAR 23 we've all been waiting for. When I asked Parker if the company is doing anticipatory planning based on CS23 revisions, he said no, although they'll monitor revision activity and apply what they can. This doesn't surprise me. Even a small airplane project is like a bomb with a lit fuse; it burns money at a furious rate for months with no return. The explosion comes when no revenue is forthcoming because certification took longer and cost more than anticipated or when it reaches problems insurmountable with the remaining capital. CS23 is still too vague and ill-formed to do anything other than potentially delay things. Mooney CEO Jerry Chen told me the balance of time to market versus certification costs favors time to market. He says he wants an airplane ready for the potential China market before the market starts clamoring for it, if indeed that happens.

Meanwhile, Mooney says the M10T's price will be competitive. Make of that what you will, but I would peg it between the $250,000 Flight Design plans for its C4 and the $420,000 Cessna wants for its diesel Skyhawk. I realize that spread isn't too helpful or insightful. But it's the best I can do from here under the bed.