President Obama getting business done
aboard the most advanced business aircraft
in the world, Air Force One.
When President Obama last week lumped together business jet owners and hedge fund managers — what average citizen doesn't think of Bernie Madoff when he hears that phrase? — as examples of rich people getting unfair tax breaks, it was clear that the gloves had come off. The President was once again picking what he perceived as an easy target and again it is business aviation. The President singled out accelerated depreciation as a special tax break that the very wealthy enjoy and that the country can't afford.
The problem is that the President himself made accelerated depreciation — which is, at heart, a tax break on business aircraft — part of his own stimulus package. So when he attacked the break, he was attacking his own program. The White House has officially declined credit for the creation of the program, though it has not denied its endorsement of it.
The problem is, the President wants his cake — getting credit for helping to revitalize American industry — and eat it too — by attacking those fat cat bizjet owners as leverage to get tax increases in his budget fight with Congressional Republicans.
My mom used to tell me when you want to get to the heart of the matter, look not at what someone says but at what they do. The President is one of the world's foremost users of business aviation — as has been every chief executive for 50 years before him — and when campaign season is in full swing (as it seems to be half the time these days), his bizjet use is supercharged. He knows that important people doing important business and living their lives use bizjets to get things done. That's because he's one of those people. The bottom line is, President Obama understands perfectly how useful bizjets are. So it is politically cynical of him to vilify bizjet "owners" for political gain while he benefits from the very model he demonizes.
The other big problem for President Obama is that the bizjet model he is now attacking is responsible for billions of dollars of economic activity and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the United States. If it takes some tax incentives to help create an environment in which people continued to buy the airplanes that support that kind of activity, the President should do the right thing, pass up the opportunity to make political hay at the industry's — and the American people's — expense and get down to the hard job of making tough choices.
Because when it comes down to it, the President is really just lobbying for tax increases, but regardless of which side of that issue you fall on, it serves no one's best interests to attack such an important part of our national economy. There's simply too much at stake.
Read more of Robert's recent blog posts.
All Comments
garnaut,
Great explanations - thanks! I hadn't thought, obviously, about the rapid temperature change during the piston stroke.
The link you provided was very interesting - although the low engine weight did seem to entirely omit an exhaust manifold! (Bet the neighbors weren't keen on that!)
It sounds like the key may be to get an engine like this onto UAVs, where large production volumes are possible. It would have to burn Jet A.
I have to say I think some commentators have become carried away with their comparisons of prices between 2011 and the “good old days”.
One used the comparison between the cost of a new 1973 trainer (Cessna 150 then, Skycatcher today) and a “new car”, type unspecified, and quoted a differential of 3-4 times then vs. 10 times today, a pretty incredible jump.
This didn’t sound quite right to me and sure enough, although a 1973 C-150 at $12,000 did indeed cost about 3.1 times what a Ford 500 (fairly basic car in ‘73) went for, today’s Skycatcher at $112,000 is only about 4.7 times the price of a comparable new Ford sedan, the Taurus.
Consider the fact that the Ford today is built in very large quantities on highly automated production lines at a fraction of the 1973 man-hour requirements while the Cessna is produced in miniscule quantities on production lines that still feature large amounts of hand labor simply because the volume won't support the immensively expensive automation.
Low prices are all about mass production. People just can’t seem to understand that their $300 iPhone would cost probably $30,000 or more if built in Skycatcher quantities.
To all the folks who say they can design, test, certify and produce a better, more efficient airplane, engine or whatever, then profitably sell it significantly cheaper in small GA quantities, I say “Go to it, man!” That is exactly how people get rich in America (or China, for that matter). Otherwise - sorry to be blunt - all that talk is just wishful hot air.
SocalFlyer,
Agreed. No modern manufacturing techniques have been brought to bear: the Skycatcher is built using the same techniques as the DC-3 was. The question is, if one thinks out of the box a bit, is it possible to change that, and not just a little bit, but dramatically? Very likely any viable approach would have to piggyback on high-volume production of something else.
I think it's a worthwhile challenge to throw out there.
I haven't yet heard a good answer.
Thomas,
Piggybacking on some other high-volume production would be great but I fear the specialized requirements of GA...or aviation in general...block out most approaches, and even if you find one that does seem to mesh you come up against the immensely expensive regulatory hurdles.
Consider an automated production line that mass-produces COTS (to borrow a military acronym) hardware such as nuts & bolts. Even if the base cost of the automated machinery is paid for by the mass hardware market and can crank out aviation-grade parts at only a few cents per bolt more, the aviation version still ships out the door at a manufacturing cost 10 or 20 times as high as a COTS part due to the crippling regulatory requairements that apply to every bit and piece of an airplane.
The same sort of problem applies to R&D costs you hope to bypass by re-engineering some item or other.
An example of this would be the Williams fan-jet engines that power many of our small jets. Although derived from previous UAV designs, the additional cost of re-engineering to commercial and regulatory standards have pushed their production cost right up there with the purpose-designed Pratt & Whitneys.
Prior to retirement I worked as a systems engineer and had to be aware of and critically weigh all the factors that would affect the cost, usability and maintainability of the final system. If you read back over this thread you see an awful lot of factors being either totally ignored or dismissed with an airy wave of the hand. If only life worked like that.
You are the one dismissing ideas with an airy wave, socal.
Have you done any studies on this issue? I have. I have several patents pending, including a heat exchanger technology that can make the recuperated cycle a reality for small turbine engines (as well as large turbine engines).
Do a search on Microturbines and see the diesel-beating fuel efficiency they are getting from what is basically a turbocharger with a burner can added (plus the heat exchanger, which is the enabling technology to recuperating the waste heat going out the pipe).
Regulating every nut and bolt on a piston airplane is a very stupid thing. That is why the FAA brought out the Primary Category. Please see the link to the FAR I provided above. The only two airplanes that have been certified so far are a light-sport type plane, Rans 7, and a 2-seat Qucksilver ultralight with a 2-stroke engine.
This despite the fact that maximum seats is 4, max weight is 2700 lb (3450 is seaplane), and any engine power as long as naturally aspirated. Plus you can even give flight instruction and other for-hire activities with some conditions attached.
Really your comment comes off as totally uninformed. Regulatory climate is a NON-ISSUE for piston planes.
I work in the Part 25 sector, I know what it takes to design and build a transport airplane. The rules that are there make sense. You have to have each part make spec. The same approach does not make sense for piston airplanes which are basically large RC models, nothing more.
As for piggybacking on the huge economies of scale of large suppliers in the field, this is exactly the approach I am taking. It is all about reducing value add. The less machining, shaping, etc that you have to do to a piece the lower will be the manpower component as well as the tooling component.
I mentioned some specifics earlier and this new kind of airframe structure and assembly method is also patent pending. My detail studies show that you can build a lightplane in this method in less than 1/4 the man hours, and at a far lower materials cost to begin with.
It is not rocket science, just good engineering, something that is nonexistent in the piston airplane segment. Why? go back to the top and see where piston planes are. Two Percent of GA by dollar value. Two lousy percent. Nobody has said let's reengineer the lighplane and see if we can make it affordable. Never mind actually putting some heads to work on that.
The current manufacturers are just going through the motions with their 70 year-old TCs. Cirrus jumped in and found a profitable little niche selling nicely shaped plastic planes with bling panels for half a million bucks. Too bad only a handful of people are interested in that.
Now on the basis of this "evidence" people like you (and many others) conclude positively that the affordable plane cannot be made. HORSEFEATHERS. It can be made and IT WILL be made.
Socalflyer,
You referenced my comment about the cost of an early 70's vintage C-150 vs. a basic car. However, you then used the Skycatcher (2-seat LSA) price vs. the cost of a new Taurus. I think that comparing the Taurus (a basic 4-5 transportation machine) to the $305,000 Piper Archer is more appropriate than a comparison to a made-for training C-162. On that basis, the 2011 $300k Archer is 12 times the cost of the new $25k Taurus, while a $17,000 1973 C-172 cost about 3.5 times the price of a Ford 500. Rather than getting into a discussion on economics, my intent was to point out that the 2011 $25k car is not only far better (in durability, reliability, fuel economy, and almost any other measure) and cheaper (in current dollars) than the early 70's version, but cost of any airplane that you can name is inflated far beyond the ability of most people to pay for it. Perhaps that might be justified if the plane was exponentially better than the 1970's version - but (in spite of Robert Goyer's comments to the contrary), it is essentially the same as the 40-year-old version. Even the Archer flight review admitted that no aspect of the airframe or engine has been changed in the last 16 years.
The bottom line is simply that purchasing any simple single-engine aircraft being built today is beyond the ability of the vast majority of pilots. Maybe it is due to economies of scale, maybe it is that manufacturers would rather put their resources into more profitable things like turboprops and bizjets, maybe it is even liability costs. But the truth is that there is nothing really new in GA, and certainly nothing that is affordable. We can debate the reasons for the next 20 or 30 years, but if all we do during that time is debate it, there will come a time when there are no used aircraft available either, new pilots won't have aircraft to train in, and GA will simply die - not just the piston portion, but the bizjet portion as well, since there will be no one trained to fly them. And since the military is shrinking and GA won't be there to train pilots, the airlines will die as well.
So it seems to me that it is the manufacturer's best interest to figure out a way to make an affordable training / basic transportation aircraft, even if they make nothing on it. If they don't, there will be no market for anything that flies.
So perhaps Flying, EAA, AOPA, GAMA, and everyone else should band together to find a solution. If not, the simple truth is that 40 years from now the era of aviation will be over.
This is an old article, the election is over and any doubts about obummer being a liar have been put to rest. To the history revisers, the communists did NOT defeat Germany, they went on a reverse land grab and subjected millions to basic slavery. No bombing missions were flown by the communists who started out in league with the nazis. No commies on D-Day either, no they were busy exacting revenge!
This debate about piston versus turbine has no end. Until you can engineer a turbo to get reasonable burn rates, there is no comparison. There is already a solution to the avgas problem and that is unleaded. I ride a motorcycle with a 66 year old air cooled engine. When leaded left the market all we had to do was change the valves and the seats for materials that were harder and did not require the lubrication of the lead. At 60,000 SMOH it has not squawked even once. Most of the engines that used leaded can be made to burn unleaded. The engine with the opposed pistons never got beyond prototype and with the dependence on the crazy gear train, wear will be a huge factor. 2 stroke diesels have been around for ever and they use mass quantity's of fuel, had a Detroit. The new Cessna JTA is a step in the right direction and it is hard to believe that fadec is not a lot more common.
The price of a brand spanking new plane is atrocious for a number of reasons due to corporate and government influences and a host of other factors. A new anything has always been high! It is now more affordable than ever to buy a good low time used plane. The math is pretty simple, buy a used plane for 60,000, twice the cost of a new car. If it is VFR or "old tech" that still works, fly it and up date it. Even if you put 100,000 into it you would have a faster, safer, more efficient airplane than the entry level LSA which is a joke. Most flight schools still teach the 6 pack, it still works just fine. Since almost everything that is older than 2010 and many of them as well will have to be updated to continue flying by 2020, this seems like a natural, now the feds need to allow the running of 91 octane unleaded and remove ALL of the taxes based on road use and add a FAIR amount to unleaded to cover airport and airplane related expenses and subsidized at the same percentage that roads are. It should make unleaded attractive enough to encourage use. This is based on the outrageous amount of taxes both federal and state that make fuel as expensive as it is. Removal of these taxes is a must, good luck with that in this "administration"! When asked, the biggest squawk is almost always fuel.
I do not think that planes from factory's will ever be any less than now because of regulation, it seems if anything it is costing more and more to make the same thing, how much different is a 172 from a new 172? Is it that many times better? Reality seems to dictate refurbishing to be the way for a lot of us to get in. It will be interesting to see what the AOPA's Deb up date ends up costing, it is a better plane in a lot of ways than the entry ones. As it has been mentioned, they have not changed that much.
When the time came to learn and get going, I was what used to be called past my prime, now that has changed as well with pilots flying well into what used to be called old age. The FFA to it's credit has SLOWLY, ever so, began to realize that M.D.'s and medicine have advanced at a really good clip and yes, gasp, you can wear glasses! Or even keep your blood pressure in check, safely, with no effect on anything. The reality is the air space where most folks live now is too crowded and to complicated to safely navigate by a newbie. The cost of fuel, equipment rental and instructor costs in the larger city's is almost double the price in smaller venues, fuel is fuel. That combination is deadly to learning and getting new pilots on board. I was in my mid fifty's before I could afford it and still have to really prepare to fly into heavily controlled air space.
If general aviation is going to survive a lot more of the hanger queens are going to have to start to accumulate time rather than dust. Just for kicks, jump over to ebay and see what is listed for single engine planes, it will lead you to a reputable dealer that has been sitting on the same cream puffs through 2 annuals. When they announced the price of the JTA, just over half a million dollars, I started looking for a way around it. One way is to learn stick and rudder and the 6 pack, may save your life anyway, and to pick up one that can be done in "affordable" stages. In quotes because it isn't and never will be. Still for less than even a Van's kit finished, a 4 seat, 150 knot cruise, retractable gear modernized aircraft that has averaged less than 60 hours a year for it's entire life. Shop, and shop hard. Then if you can save in another place or the A&P's are hungrier elsewhere then by all means go. The worst thing I see is a bunch of negative wannabees sitting on their back sides sniveling about what they can or cannot afford, either make it happen or go play golf, oh and put those hanger queens up for sale!
No 50,000 plane, wanted, many new pilots, learn how to shop and get in the air. If you can only fly once a month it is better than nothing!
