By Kristy Gilligan 

Leather interior, airbag seatbelts and metallic paint. With manufacturers struggling for pole position in new aircraft sales there is an unusual similarity emerging between the new aircraft market and the new car market.

Previously, a new aircraft was sold based on the essential equipment, safety and other important stuff like having wings. These days, just like a new Range Rover, you can choose your new aircraft by its less essential features such as leather interior, airbag seatbelts, color scheme and my personal favorite…cup holders. And how do we make our purchase decision? Not by trial flights and sitting down with sales people but by online virtual tours, build-your-own online pricing and two years on a waiting list.

Throwing aside my solemn concerns for the pilot whose priorities place a cup holder over a carburetor, this is a great time for GA if you’ve got the cash. Assuming you do, it’s a competitive market with a good Aussie dollar and a whole lot of empty airspace. The trap for the cashed up buyer is where to start…and stop. The apparently small price gap between various types makes it easy to become what I call a runaway buyer.

The potential owner-flyer like me has never been able to consider aircraft ownership because it’s been too expensive to play a hand in the game. Now, with the dollar good and the choices on hand, I’ve got a fist full of aces. The latest offering from Cessna is attracting many buyers in the same boat. The Cessna Skycatcher 160 is rocking the GA world with its affordable price (in Cessna terms), fashionable looks and very smart specifications. On first glance, the Skycatcher just looks like an ultralight to me, but a closer inspection in the cockpit reveals something a lot more, and a lot less than what your would expect to see. In this instance, less is more because the cockpit has been cleaned out to reveal a sports car interior. You guessed it - cup holders, carbon bucket seats and a glass cockpit. The retro colour schemes are a nice break away from the standard caravan stripes and the glass cockpit is very tidy, even though it does jack the price up a little beyond what you might hope to pay for a 100hp 118 knot aircraft. No matter, $111,500US plus CPI is not a number I ever expected to hear in the same sentence as the word Cessna. Since the Skycatcher is really a minimalist approach to flying, it raises a question. If I spent just a few dollars more could I go faster, carry more people and have that new leather smell? The answer is indisputably yes.

Say I spent just under US$200,000US. That would get me into the Cirrus SR20 G3 and boy what a difference that would make. So Cirrus have made, in my mind, the mistake of placing jagged caravan stripes on a really beautiful airframe but I forgive them this one small indiscretion because the rest of the package is dynamite. Performance credentials put cruise speed at 178 knots indicated and a range of about 785 nautical miles, for example from Melbourne to mid Queensland somewhere. The Cirrus website allows you to explore all the features of the SR20 and the SR20 GTS. Safety is a standard feature for the Cirrus with the well known Cirrus Airframe Parachute Systems (CAPS), airbag seatbelts and terrain awareness system. These features could justify the extra money spent on the Cirrus SR-20 over the Cessna Skycatcher. Once I set my mind to spending the US$350,000 on a fully optioned SR20 (3 bladed prop just another $3450, storm scope $10,000 and so on…) it would be easy to justify the US$17,000 extra to go to the GTS. The paint scheme is better and it has everything standard except the storm scope and autopilot. Funnily enough, leather or fabric interior is the same price according to the website. It’s a fair bit of money to spend but the SR20 does have cup holders too.

Being this far into debt is like being a few metres off the beach. It’s already so deep that you can’t touch the bottom, so why not swim out a bit further? Oh, it’s worth it for that new aircraft smell!

A professional sales person knows all too well that a buyer will start shopping at around their limit and then work their way up from there. Car dealers do it, so do white goods retailers. There is always a basic model, at what appears to be a good price for the features. Then they start the sales spiel and work you into a frenzy over cruise control, digital displays, ABS, EMax MFD, PFD, and all the latest acronyms. Aviation has not been good at this in the past. The new aircraft manufacturers have certainly turned it up a notch.

Let us ask the bank manager for another $100K (it’s just money) and spend about half a million US dollars. Will the new aircraft smell be any better? Not likely. But the numbers keep getting bigger in more than just the price tag. Take the Cessna 400 recently acquired from Columbia Aircraft. With this little ripper you could take yourself and three mates just about anywhere on the north coast of Australia non stop within 1148 nautical miles of home: that’s about 400 nautical miles more than the SR20. And it’s no slow poke at 179 knots: no better than the Cirrus, but no worse.

To really blow both yourself and your bank manager out of the water consider a turbo prop aircraft like the Socata TBM 850. If you are just independently wealthy, plan to hire-purchase or have a business which can buy it for you, the single engine turbo prop will take you a long way, even rivalling the next dimension of aircraft – the VLJ jet. The TBM 850 seats six, four of them down the back in a very smart club configuration. The cup holders of the Skycatcher or Cirrus are raised to the next level with fold out trays and the feel up the front is that of a much larger and commanding aircraft. Throttle out and blow your hair back at 320 knots. Why not load her up and go from Sydney to Auckland? Good luck to you since you can still afford the fuel after paying the bank and insurer. This is the serious end of the prop driven aircraft market, but trust me, people do fly them privately. The reason, as a rule, is that the owner lives in a very remote area, owns their own corporation or in the rare instance that the guy is larger than your average road-goer. There just aren’t a lot of choices for a few hundred kilos of tall, broad shouldered business partners. The Skycatcher would be out of the question because it would be over maximum take off weight before they filled their cup holders.

Some will tell you this aspect of GA is under threat of extinction but sales figures tell a different story. There are some people who can afford to spend these dollars on such overstated aircraft. Thanks to huge sales, order your Cessna Skycatcher today and you’ll likely receive it from the factory some time in 2011, according to Cessna Dealer, Aeromil Pacific. There are over 1,000 sold and the numbers keep rising. The lower prices from manufacturers are one contributing factor, as is the strong Australian dollar against the US dollar. To boot, the used craft fleet is deteriorating, getting a little smelly and we’re all sick of looking at those caravan stripes. We are as wealthy as we have ever been (for now) which makes it easier to consider large purchases. Finance is also easier to get and secure against our three houses. Plus China started manufacturing cheap stuff which has ingrained us with the habit of buying it today and throwing it away, cup holders and all, tomorrow.

A new aircraft is delivered to you test flown and ready to go, with maintenance support and training if you need it. Some manufacturers include these services in the aircraft price and others charge extra. It’s a great area for manufacturers to create a point of difference for their company and, if they can’t compete on unit price, they can often afford to be flexible in this area. A second hand aircraft is quite the opposite. From a maintenance point of view you are usually buying someone else’s problems. From an endorsement perspective it might be easier to find an instructor qualified on type to check you out in a used aircraft, but you on your own when it comes to price.

In the past these new aircraft would only be considered for purchase by flight schools and charter companies. But today there are a growing number of owner buyers deciding to go for new aircraft. While there is no exact published figure, it is believed to be around 20% of total single engine piston aircraft sales for a lot of manufacturers. Perhaps this is somehow thanks to the car industry. It has undergone the same changes in the past, and these days you are far more likely to buy a new car than your great grandparents would have been. Hopefully our disposable society doesn’t forego the safety and longevity we have celebrated in aviation to date for disposable aircraft. But the rethinking of design and materials in aviation does not seem to be heading in this direction; more the opposite. The gear keeps getting better, stronger and faster, while the prices keep getting cheaper.

Before you buy be sure to speak to the manufacturers and to the current owners too. It’s easy to get caught up in the beautiful web sites, 360 degree virtual tours and glossy brochures, then sign up your life’s earnings for an aircraft you’ll likely not see in the next five years.

But please do have your cup holders, leather interior and your airbags too: you are the owner buyer and if you can afford it is a worthwhile option. It’s worth it just to bathe yourself in that delicious new aircraft smell.