Comments

This. Will. NEVER. Happen. I've noticed over some 35 years of following the av biz that the standard response to the consistent failure of one set of "visionary entrepreneurs" after another is to simply keep raising the target to ever-higher levels of technical or economic impossibility. Nobody could make VLJs work until they cost as much as existing low-end bizjets...now these guys are going to fly the 1% around at Mach 4? Sorry, not even at $180M a copy. Once you've had enough of the "Gee whiz!" Kool-aid, you see that a company like Cirrus is an example of a truly visionary operation. They took basic technology that had been flying for decades, skillfully updated it, added compelling new but not bleeding-edge elements, packaged the resulting airplanes into a modern marketing envelope and achieved real success. Robinson is another example, changing the market for light helicopters through decades of hard work. In aviation, time after time, "clean-sheet" equals "investors cleaned out."

Everyone loves to write about what a great trainer the 172 is. Nonsense. Any "greatness" it possesses comes from its popularity, not its suitability for the task. The 172 is not a good basic trainer; it is far too forgiving. I fly new 172s all the time, but I'm really glad I didn't learn to fly in one.