MOSAIC Next Steps-an interview with Rian Johnson
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2024
- As part of the Oshkosh Live streaming television we did from AirVenture, KITPLANES editor in chief Marc Cook sat down with Rian Johnson, who is besides his role as head of design engineering at Van's Aircraft, the chair of the ASTM F37 committee working on MOSAIC standards. In this interview, he looks ahead at the next steps for MOSAIC and offers his perspective for what might come out of the FAA next year when the new rules package is announced.
Im sure hoping for at least 58kts stall…
So basically this re-authorization bill requires them to have it completed by a certain timeline. Just like the bill before it. Maybe (if they follow their mandate) we'll see it by the end of 2025.🙄
Excellent discussion!
At about 2:20, you're seeing Rian suggest "manufacturers will be able to make airplanes"... what he's referring to here is manufacturing airplanes that bypass all of the costs of Part 23 aircraft testing for GA certified aircraft. Mosaic will reduce testing requirements to an "industry consensus" which means it will soon be dramatically less costly to manufacture mosaic aircraft. There are dozens of other benefits to Mosaic, but there are down sides. GA certified aircraft will become more costly to maintain for dozens of reasons. A> the market will collapse for them, except for IFR rated aircraft. B> mechanics will be hard to find. C> demand will change to the self-maintain mosaic aircraft. What will happen to the GA fleet when your annuals start to cost 10-20k per year? We will have a GA part 23 certified aircraft boneyard at every airport.
The biggest counter-intuitive result will be the total destruction of EAB Aircraft Kits. The entire homebuilding industry will be eliminated within a decade. Kit companies will realize that it's far more profitable to sell 10 completed mosaic aircraft for $500k than 100 kit aircraft for $50k. Why are LSA aircraft not priced this high today? Because they're slow and very limited in useful capabilities. Those limits will arbitrarily be lifted, and all of a sudden even the LSA market skyrockets into the 300-400k price range overnight under the conditions of mosaic.
There will be no GA or EAB aircraft left after MOASIC is done. Mark my words... there's no incentive to manufactures to do anything other than build completed aircraft moving forward. Just look at where the composite kit industry ended up. Look at the cost to build a pitts or christen eagle. A $20k kit now costs over $300k for a kit, not because it's more expensive, but because they sell completed aircraft that are more profitable. They don't want to sell kits. Some manufacturers just bypass the kit market entirely. For example, have you ever seen a new Game Bird kit price? Here's a company who recently figured out that building the entire aircraft is the most profitable way to do it.
Enter MOSAIC... and watch the industry totally transform. The days of kit aircraft will be limited to kit clone aircraft where you buy the CNC and materials and cut the parts yourself from plans. They will leave it up to the insurance companies to shut down that part of the market.
Ask Vans to sign a pledge to never exit the kit aircraft industry, and to keep prices attainable. Won't happen. Their intent is to follow the money which will be to build completed aircraft at high prices and exit the kit industry. They may not know it yet.
I think you are out of your mind. How many people do you think are out there that can afford a $500k airplane? If they could, they would right now be buying..... wait for it..... A BRAND NEW PIPER Pilot 100i for under $300k, or a brand new Cessna 172 for between $300k and $400k. Apparently you do not understand the kitplane market. The kitplane market is made up of thousands and thousands of middle-class income men who can not afford to fly GA. Particularly the maintenance, but the acquisition costs are not unimportant. If I can buy a $7000 empennage kit this year, and a $15k wings kit the next year, and a $20k fuselage and finishing kit the third year, and top it off with a $20k Viking 195 turbo, and that's all I can afford, do you really think I'm in the market for $500k completed plane?
@@georgeburns1561💯
@@georgeburns1561 that's right.
That's exactly right. So what does that mean for you? That means you're going to either have to have the money for a brand new airplane, or go back to experimenting on your own.
Do you think these EAB kit manufacturers are going to keep building kits after mosaic? If so... why? It's not because their heart is in it. Insurance and risk is at an all time high. Lawsuits have already established the ability to sue kit manufacturers for flaws, and the Vans laser cutting fiasco was a prime example of how they went bankrupt over a bad process.
On the other hand, if you can produce a kit, you can produce a completed airplane. What stopped kit companies from selling airplanes before? Part 23 certification did. The 51% rule did. The LSA speed and performance and passenger limitations kept LSAs at arbitrarily dumb low limits that didn't demand the attention from the market. They had a ceiling on the price they could demand for those factory LSAs.
With MOSAIC... those limits are all gone. They're poof... consensus standards.
That means to make $100M, you could sell 200 completed airplanes at $500k, or you could sell 2000 kits at $50k. 10x more profit doing 100x less work.
Meanwhile it'll take you 10 years to sell 2000 kits for a specific aircraft model, it'll take you 6 months to sell 200 aircraft per year at the rate Cirrus did.
If there's a kit manufacturer left in 10 years after MOSAIC, it'll be because they're stupid. Guess why Vans has their head hauncho on the board of mosaic? Because they want to produce aircraft, not kits. MOSAIC is not about producing kits, it's about AIRPLANES from a FACTORY. There's nothing "KIT" about MOSAIC.
And that's why it's the death to EAB and EAA and General Aviation. Because your current GA fleet will be impossible to maintain in ten years after MOSAIC hits mainstream. The laws of unintended consequences here are endless.
@@Irjdunn1 I totally disagree. If there is a kit manufacturer left in ten years, it will be because there are literally hundreds of thousands of male middle class want-a-be aircraft owners who don't have the means to buy a whole plane, and we will cater to those individuals. Yes, a certain percentage of those will join a flight club, but another certain percentage would rather own their own plane outright.
@@georgeburns1561 I think you’re speaking past the biggest issue.
If you’ve gone through the trouble of inventing or cloning a kit… and now it costs you zero extra dollars to certify that aircraft design to sell full airplanes at 10-30x the profit of individual parts, and those individual parts will cost you headaches to manufacture, support, and ship, and your actual profit motive is to just not go broke… again… like the majority of plans build or kit built aircraft over the years…
Then the question remains. Why not just sell one or two completed mosaic consensus built aircraft for $500k and stop selling parts for cheap?
Aviat acquired the christen eagle ii. It was a $25k biplane wooden kit from the 80’s. Aviat sells certified and factory built experimental aircraft now. Do you know how much that christen eagle ii kit costs? About $300k. Why? Because they don’t want to sell kits anymore.
There will not be a business model left on the face of the planet for anyone to want to continue to produce kits, and it won’t matter how many people can’t afford full aircraft, it’ll matter how many CAN and that will make aviation inaccessible to everyone else. EAA and all of these so called “advocates” for general aviation are doing nothing to bring down the cost of aviation, they’re actually destroying it by creating monopolies and allowing consolidation of an already monopolized and highly regulated and manipulated market. Say goodbye to affordable aircraft.
They’ll point to LSAs being cheap and so they say mosaic aircraft will be just as cheap… the minute mosaic rules take effect, LSA prices skyrocket because they’ll lift the performance limitations they were required to meet.
When was the last time EAA provided engineering education on how to design new aircraft, or released a community opensource aircraft design, or bought and made available the plans and dimensions of the RV10 which is now beyond the useful 20 protection of patent laws so that members could cut their own parts out with cnc machines from raw stock aluminum? What about Cessna designs from 1980… why don’t we have dozens of clone kit companies selling kit parts when we have dozens of clone full aircraft companies improving on the same design? Because it’s not profitable to sell kits, and when you can sell full aircraft and make millions, you do that.