(http://airfactsjournal.

com)

/ APRIL 29, 2013

The Dream V. The

Reality: Its A Tough
World

by RichardCollins(h t t p ://a irfa ct s jou rn a l . com /a u t h or/col l in s /)

t might also be true in other areas, but it has always seemed to me that general
aviation is littered with more broken dreams than any other eld. As an
observer for about 60 years, the length of the list of failed projects amazed me
when I wrote down the ones that I remember.

I will use one project that I watched closely for a while to begin the discussion.
Back in the 1970s, I heard that there was a futuristic light twin in Mississippi that
already had FAA Part 23 certi cation and that would soon be in production. That
news surprised me because in the magazine business we usually learned of new
airplanes as soon as they were drawn on a napkin in the bar.
The Burns BA-42 was a
conventional mid-wing light

Burns BA-42

twin. The only break with

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tradition was its t-tail. That had

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not yet become a rage in

general aviation design.

The Burns BA-42 got certi ed, but could

never be built in any number.

The BA-42 had a pair of

Continental engines similar to those that power the Cessna 337 Skymaster. I think

they were rated for the same 210 horsepower as those in the 337.
Sam Burns had big dreams for the BA-42 and I spent quite a bit of time at his modest
facility in Starkville, Mississippi, also home of Mississippi State University.
Sam had done the development and certi cation of the BA-42 on a shoestring though
he never did divulge how much money was invested in the project through
certi cation. He never said, but I always guessed he had informal help from
Mississippi States legendary aeronautical engineering department.
The project was begun in the 1960s and lasted into the 1970s. Two airframes were
built but I dont remember that both were actually ying. One was, for sure, because
Jack Olcott of FLYING ew it and gave a good report on its ying qualities.
The next step after certi cation is production and I think Sam Burns thought he could
smell the roses at one point. Another town in Mississippi had oated revenue bonds
to build a factory and I visited that factory. There was nothing in the plant other than
one BA-42. No tooling. No nothing.
Sam and I drew numbers in the dust on the oor and the conclusion was that there
was no way he could achieve a positive cash ow unless a lot of money was poured
into the project. Sam did not have that kind of money and had failed to nd a backer
who was willing to gamble on the project. It would have been a gamble, too, because
the light twin market was well-populated with products from existing manufacturers
and his BA-42 did not offer any clear advantages.
The dif culty of certi cation
has often been cited as the
reason more new airplanes are
not developed. This did not
deter Sam and his small band of
workers. What did was a lack of
capital, something that has
doomed many an airplane
project. The best way to lose a
sum of money on something like
this is to start out with just a
little less money than you need.
In the end, it always seems to
cost more, sometimes much

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The Windecker Eagle was the rst composite

airplane to be certi ed.

more, than any original

estimate. Maybe it is better to
start with at least twice as much money as it is estimated to cost.
The Windecker Eagle was the rst composite airplane certi ed. I ew it once and it
was just okay. I learned quickly that being inside a composite airplane with a big
engine out front was a lot like being in a bass drum while the band is playing. It
seemed like there was no way for the sound to get out. The project died before it
really got started. Perhaps they could have quieted the cabin if they had been able to
continue.
The pressurized Mooney M30 ew but was not certi ed. It was a big airplane and
when watching it rst y, I was struck by the apparent struggle it had getting off the
ground. Mooney had previously certi ed the pressurized Mooney Mustang single but
it didnt nd much market. I never ew that airplane but, by all accounts, it was quite a
slug.
A recent piston airplane that didnt make it was the composite Adam 500 push-pull
twin. A proof-of-concept airplane was built by Scaled Composites and then a full-size
500 was built by Adam.
I ew the Adam 500 with my
friend Glenn Maben and found
it good but not exceptional.
They were projecting
certi cation at an early date but
the airplane I ew wasnt
pressurized, didnt have any
heat in it, and entry was by a
ladder after which the ground
crew tted the door in place
and latched it. In other words,
there was still a lot of work to
be done. It also didnt meet the
cruise speed projections but

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Adam sunk millions into the A500, but never

really nished the airplane.

Adam said they would be

installing gear doors and that would x the speed. I dont know whether they ever did
this but I doubt if the speed would have gotten up to what was projected.
This is a good place to look at factors that can doom new designs.

The Adam and the certi ed and produced Beech Starship had things in common. The
Adam weighed well over 1,000 pounds more than its projected empty weight. The
Starship weighed an extra ton or more.
In that both were composite airplanes, with proof of concept airframes built by
Scaled Composites, the rst conclusion might be that designers using this method of
construction have extra sets of rose-colored glasses. There are successful composite
airplanes, such as the Cirrus, but I have never seen a composite that weighs less than
a like metal airplane and I have seen at least two that weigh a lot more.
The simple fact is that composites are not magic and in the best of cases have not
offered either weight or cost advantages.
Another thing that makes it
tough for new designs is
competition. Is it a better
airplane? Will it have equal or
better reliability? Will the
available service and support be
as good as for other airplanes?
Both the Adam 500 and the
Starship fell short of being
better airplanes.
There have been a lot of turbine
airplane projects that barely got
off the ground while some did.

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Beechs Starship, the supposed King Air

successor, was thousands of pounds
overweight and never caught on.

In the early 1960s, Beech built a

full-scale mockup of a Model
120 turboprop. It was to be a fairly large airplane, to take the place of the twin Beech,
Model 18. The proposed powerplant was from Turbomeca in Europe and was to
develop almost 1,000 shaft horsepower per side, compared with 450 for the Model
18.
It would have been an expensive project for Beech and Olive Ann Beech, and her
nephew Frank Hedrick, were talented but scally conservative managers. For a less
expensive airplane, they mated the Army U-21, an unpressurized turboprop Queen
Air derivative with PT-6 engines, with the airframe of a piston-powered pressurized
Queen Air Model 88, and, presto, an almost instant King Air, a design that will

celebrate 50 years of production in 2014 and is the only turboprop twin left standing
except, perhaps, for the Piaggio Avanti which shipped ve airplanes in 2012.
The King Air is especially remarkable when you consider that it outlasted the
Cheyenne family, two Cessna turboprop twins, the turboprop Commanders, the
Mitsubishi MU-2, the Merlin twin turboprops, and the Starship, all of which were
certi ed and produced and all of which have faded away.
The Avtek 400, Beech Lightning
and OMAC-1 (later Laser 300)
were turboprop designs that
never made it to production.
The Avtek was a twin, the other
two were singles. The Avtek and
OMAC were unusual in
appearance, to say the least,
and while the designers were

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probably proud of their

handiwork, many observers

The Avtek 400 was certainly an

unconventional design.

looked at the airplanes,

scratched their heads, and thought, Why did they do that?
Other turboprop singles are in the development stage and time will tell whether or
not they work out.
Pure jets are the sexiest airplanes of all and there has been no shortage of new design
proposals there, both single-engine and twin.
The Eclipse 500 twinjet was the vehicle for what has accurately been called the
largest nancial failure in the history of general aviation. Everybody suppliers,
customers, depositors, investors (including Bill Gates), got screwed, for lack of a
better word. The down-the-drain total was close to a billion dollars. That is a lot of
money to bleed out of a small (and, right now, struggling) activity. Worse, it provides
an object lesson that will deter investment in aviation products for decades to come.
The Eclipse 500 was certi ed and produced with 259 airplanes delivered. Like
everything else about the project, the certi cation was controversial. There were
suggestions of FAA favoritism toward Eclipse, if you can believe that. The rst
airplanes delivered were short of what had been promised and in the end, the

airplanes that were delivered

were sold at a price far short of
the actual cost of building those
airplanes.
A charter operator, DayJet, had
a business plan that was just as
bad when it ordered 1,400
Eclipse 500s, or, over half the
order book. That company
folded after it took delivery of a
handful of the jets and operated
them for a short while.

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The Eclipse 500 holds the record for the most

money wastedclose to $1 billion.

The Eclipse promise was to

deliver a lot of jets at a low price, even lower than the piston twin unpressurized
Beech Baron. It was a false promise from day one and when investors decided to quit
shoveling money into a bottomless pit, that was the end. A lot of us said from the
beginning that the project could not work as planned but the true believers stayed
loyal right up to the bankruptcy.
Another company bought the Eclipse assets and plans to put the airplane back into
production in 2013 and to sell it for a realistic price. How that will go remains to be
seen. Right now the entry-level jet market is so soft that Cessna has paused
production of all its more basic jets.
The Swearingen SJ-30 twin jet made it through certi cation and into limited
production though not much is going on there at present. It might be another case of
a designer coming up with an airplane he thought people should have as opposed to
an airplane that people might actually care to buy.
A lot of other twin jets have
been proposed and a few have
actually own. The Spectrum S33 Independence was in a ight
test program when it was lost
because the ailerons were
hooked up backwards after
some maintenance. The pilot I
ew with in the Adam 500, Glen
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Maben, was lost in that

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accident.

Independence.jpg)

There is a bright spot in the jet

The Spectrum S-33 Independence looked

great, but never made it into production.

business. Embraer is a new

entrant in the basic twinjet
market with the Phenom 100 and that airplane has been successful and has an
excellent reputation.
There are also the single-engine jets that have gotten publicity out of all proportion
to their progress toward certi cation and production. I would imagine the one thing
that deters investors from putting money into a single jet would be the minuscule
market size that might exist for this product. To me, a total of 50 airplanes a year
would be quite optimistic.
So, there have been a lot of broken dreams, one of which might constitute the end of
such for a long time to come if people look at the history of the Eclipse before
deciding to roll the dice on a project. It was, purely and simply, a travesty. We might
also be learning that all-new airplanes are also risky for the folks who build airliners.
Who knows what additional evils lurk in the shadows of the 787?