What got me thinking about production methods was a conversation I had at Avalon Airshow in Feb with the designer of the GA-8 Airvan. he said he was agast at the way Cessna, Piper, Beech, Mooney etc still build planes.
We were talking about a belly skin he ordered from the States, when it arrived, it was a mirriad of pieces, all hand formed and built up, yet it was still not right and had to be reworked, drilled etc before he could attacht it to the aircraft. In essence, no two pieces are identical due to the hand made production methods.
The GA-8 Airvan on the other hand, was designed on CAD, only about 12(or so) major components for the whole aircraft, all made on a CNC machine, each one comes out perfect 1st time, and hundreds of exactly identical bits can be made in a production run(in a day).
Certification costs are another area that need looking at. It cost Cirrus some 30 million USD just to get the Type and production Certificates for the SR20.
Can the whole certification be done more cheaply and expeditiously, does the whole certificaton process actually lead to a safety payoff. Could an abbreviated process result in the same or simolar level of safety in the end product.
To a degree, this philosophy has been adopted in new avionics certification, notibly in glass cockpit design. I think the Sandel EHSI was the 1st to take advantage of it. The old standard was a failure rate of 1 in a Billion or something like that, recently they changed the standard to that it only had to meet the equivalent reliablility standard of the existing instrument.
I read someohere it takes in the order of 100 man hrs to build a Porche, it takes 10 times that many man hrs to build a C172 or something like that.
At the end of the day, if we build cars like we still build planes, we'd still be driving EH Holdens.
Production costs vis a vi purchase costs, operating and maintenance costs must be halved for GA to survive.
Everything else we use has more than halved in cost and doubled in performance. Cars, machinery, telecomunications, electronics and of course computers. Planes must do the same.
[ 08 October 2001: Message edited by: Ozgrade3 ]