This seems a lot like buying a Mig-21. Yes, you can get them for dirt cheap (under $50K in the Mig-21's case [1]). But the cost in parts, maintenance, fuel, and hiring an instructor pilot so you don't kill yourself the first time you take it up will quickly exceed the initial purchase price. There's a reason why people are selling them.
The difference with helicopters is that unlike the MiG-21, there's significant commercial demand for their use (it just happens to be in a bit of a trough at the moment) and most of the costs are proportionate to how many flying hours it gets - they don't have the sharp year on year depreciation associated with commercial fixed wing aircraft because innovation is slower, design lives are longer and required maintenance intervals generally aren't measured in years. Historically, helicopters have even been known to appreciate in value over several year economic cycles.
If I wanted to make money, I'd much rather have one AW109A than 4 Mig 21s.
> Required maintenance intervals generally aren't measured in years
Isn't that a bit misleading? There are components and systems that only need servicing every few years, but general practice with helicopters is phased inspections every m months (the military generally does every 6 months).
Sure, helicopters are easier to work on and generally require less maintenance per flight hour than jets do, but they're still aircraft, so they're greedy and needy.
My experience in the military was that phased inspections on fighter aircraft was done every N flight hours, not based on a fixed amount of time, I would assume helicopters are the same, but I was under the impression that helicopters required more maintenance, not less, due to the increased mechanical complexity, but I never got to work on those, so I really have no idea.
The military pretty much follows FARs, and where they don't, they're more strict. I'd expect the military does either 100 hour or progressive inspections, hour defined as "time in service" which for most aircraft is flight time as measured by a landing gear squat switch. Many general aviation aircraft will use tachometer time where they don't have such an flight time meter. Progressive inspections pretty much are 100 hour inspections but get broken down to e.g. 4 inspections every 25 hours, and the 100 hour inspection is only considered complete once the last inspection for that cycle is done. But they could do 10 inspections every 10 hours, or whatever.
Huh. When I was an engineer (civilian) working on helicopters at a test squadron (HX-21), they put their aircraft in phase every 180 days, flight hours or no. But I guess the key words are "test squadron".
The rotor hub, transmission, and tail rotor are mechanically complex, but there are fighter aircraft out there with way more mechanically complex systems (F-35B lift system comes to mind).
It could be that it has a special, experimental, or provisional airworthiness certificate, in which case that certification determines inspections rather than FARs. If it had none of those, and wasn't an aircraft used for hire, then the annual inspection applies. And all that means is that the requirements for an annual inspection are met within the previous 12 calendar months, so they could certainly do 1/2 the required annual inspection every 180 days.
You may be right. I am not at all knowledgeable about airworthness certificates. I did assist with supplying engineering documentation for flight clearances, but those are not the same thing.
I'm thinking less of the periodic inspections which aren't that expensive in the scheme of aircraft ownership costs, and more of the fact your average commercial jet needs heavy checks which essentially rebuild the aircraft every six years at a multimillion dollar cost even if it hasn't been heavily used. afaik the mandatory time-scheduled heavy maintenance on most helicopter types is comparatively limited and it's replacing components - according to flying hours rather than age - that costs virtually all the money.
In general, yes, but there's a fairly large market for filming with helis since you can mount nice camera equipment unrestricted by fixed wing fuselages, propellers, etc. and take nice, slow shots at low altitude. Of course, this is being replaced by much cheaper drones. Sightseeing is another decent size use case, which often doesn't really involve hovering. And news/traffic reporting usually occupies a few helis in cities where they're primarily cruising around.
They sounds awesome fun for one thing... If cost was no object, I'd certainly be roaming the skies in one, rather than rollerblading and such... (I mean, I'd do both, not at the same time probably)
Reminds me of reading how one of the Solyent founders bought a genome sequencer at auction. May well have been cheap, but you need a lot of knowledge and materials to use one, and the tech is evolving pretty rapidly, so will probably be outdated pretty soon.
Not everything military is necessarily ITAR'd. A lot of components for legacy aircraft are now far outclassed by COTS equipment, or are now COTS equipment themselves, so there's not a need for especially stringent export/import requirements anymore. So these components might be removed from ITAR (Defense/State Department) control, and shifted to being controlled by the EAR (Export Administration Regulation) and the US Department of Commerce, which is less restrictive.
> Global rotorcraft production will likely total just 1,050 in 2016, which would be the fewest in at least a decade, according to Forecast International.
This is surprising to me; I would have expected the number of helicopters made per year to be a lot higher. (The figure accompanying the quote clarifies that it's referring to the civilian market; presumably military helicopters are being made in larger quantities?)
Also, it's counterintuitive that they cite lower fuel costs as a reason for the decline (since they're popular with oil and gas companies).
> Also, it's counterintuitive that they cite lower fuel costs as a reason for the decline (since they're popular with oil and gas companies).
The article mentions they use helicopters to survey prospective mines and oilfields, but they also use them to get workers and supplies to and from oil rigs. Apparently in the Gulf of Mexico alone, there are between 5,000 and 9,000 flights per day[0]. Lower fuel costs = less production = less flights to rigs = less need for newer helicopters.
Of course it also mentions that drones are now often being used for surveys, and that's likey another big reason: for photography, surveying (not just oil but many other industries), inspections, surveillance, etc drones are much cheaper and easier than sending usually multiple people up in the air.
Yeah I'm not convinced they are. As far as I know most blockbuster movies are still using helicopters for aerial filming, with drones being the exception rather than the rule.
I had a college friend that was a helicopter pilot in the reserves and shared this little tidbit with me: Rotor-craft maintenance per flight hour is typically around 4 hours. Really crazy to consider.
That's harmless by military standards – for jets it's in the order of 10+ hours. Even Humvees have an hour maintenance per 3 hours use by some reports (although I think that's for the up-armoured versions that overtax the chassis and drive train with all the applique armour).
>expected the number of helicopters made per year to be a lot higher.
Why? Think about the number of times you (or an average person) has been on a airplane vs a helicopter. For me, the difference is approximately 2 orders of magnitude. 100,000 airplanes manufactured per year seems quite high (Boeing and Airbus make about 1000/year, each [0]). As mentioned below, aircraft last quite a long time.
>presumably military helicopters are being made in larger quantities?
Again, why? Helicopters probably reached their peak usage during the Vietnam War, when about 12,000 were used [1] over 20 years.
As an aside, this is something that's always bothered me. A good car/truck should last decades with proper upkeep but somehow manufacturers have talked us into thinking we need to keep buying new ones instead of repairing the old ones.
It's rather different in aviation though. There's countless mandatory checks and services along with mandatory engine rebuilds required to keep cert of airworthiness. You also get pretty strict type approval of what you can fit, where, and when.
The regs get stricter if it's being used for commercial flying as opposed to private, also if turbine engined.
So you get an awful lot of Pipers and Cessnas from the 60s and 70s still flying around with 40s technology carburetor Lycoming engines that are still being made for new aircraft. Just the same for the countless Bell 205 copters flying around with 50s Lycoming turbines.
Cars have moved along far more by comparison and stop passing tightening emmissions regs, so they stop making a model or engine. Aviation emissions are often horrifying, though newer aero engines are getting much better. They've even started using fuel injection!
edit: e.g. Buy a $700,000 2016 Piper Seminole twin, lift an engine cowl and it'll be a 6L carburetted, air cooled 4, magneto 50s engine, with 50s noise (probably open pipes still) and emissions. Far more 50s station wagon than Ford Taurus. Cockpit will have GPS and some toys though. Probably much nicer seats.
Fuel injection was available on aircraft sold in the 60's. It's complexity is what prevents it from being dominant in aircraft, so you're quite right that a 2016 Seminole does in fact ship with carburetted engines (O-360-A1H6). The fact is that carburetted engines are cheaper to build and maintain, and their simplicity arguably makes then safer (due to fewer equipment failures).
Aviation emissions could be reduced through legislation, but people will die as a direct result.
>Aviation emissions could be reduced through legislation, but people will die as a direct result.
Or they will stop flying until manufacturers can put out reliable engines. I thought aviation safety was very high because of strict regulations around durability. Surely nobody would be allowed to fly if they were so unsafe?
There's a reason aviation is many times safer than driving and an expensive field to play in. It came slowly though.
An old engine or airframe means they're well understood and don't trigger need for re-certifying. Every time an issue is found or production improvement is made it'll show up in EASA or FAA revised certification, maintenance schedules, time between checks, or even how you're allowed to operate it. Every identified accident cause filters into the system similarly.
A famous case came when jet liners were new, in the early 50s. The ground breaking DH Comet, and the world's first jetliner, was mysteriously falling out of the sky [1] with loss of all on board after around a year in service. That was when the world learned about metal fatigue in airframes and stress points. If it hadn't been DH it would have happened to Boeing or someone else [2].
The legacy was such that DH lost commercial opportunity for half a decade, and the world started along the track to a recognisably modern accident investigation and aircraft certification regime. Histories of that period in aviation are fascinating as it was also a particularly vibrant period as all the wartime progress was applied to lots of new designs of civil aircraft.
I'm not sure the thresholds differentiating between "it's a new engine now, full prototype testing and certification please", and the aviation equivalent of a revision note, but it seems incredibly low. Those Lycoming engines don't even put out a few more bhp than they did when newly designed back in 1950-something. A simple improvement in say carburettor design that would see a car maker just add the change doesn't happen easily in aviation. That's so some vanishingly rare circumstance doesn't cause it to fail in service with associated loss of life.
I dread to think what GA or Transport certification runs in at, but plenty have gone bust trying to make better GA planes or engines. Microlight, Light Sport and homebuilt (lightly certified) sectors have dozens of interesting weird designs and ideas, and experiments with new materials.
Even with all that mistakes are made, and people die, especially with new designs. The deaths stop much more quickly than in many other fields.
When a helicopter like a Super Puma, favourite of offshore operators, a 40 year old relatively simple airframe and engine has a $15m price tag faster progress becomes prohibitive. It's the aviation equivalent of a minibus. Just it's a very safe minibus with bookshelves full of accident history and safety revisions.
Few people want to spend the same kind of money on maintenance for their $10,000 car as they do on their $200,000 aircraft.
My last car had 150,000 miles on it, and needed around $3000 of engine work (timing chain, head gasket). The car was only worth around $4000, so I traded it in on a new car.
But when you have a $200,000 aircraft, a $15K overhaul every 1500 - 2000 hours is worth it to keep it in the air. 1800 hours is equivalen to 80,000 miles of driving at 45mph. Who wants to pay thousands of dollars to overhaul their car's engine after 80,000 miles even if it means that the car will run fine for another 80,000 miles?
>My last car had 150,000 miles on it, and needed around $3000 of engine work (timing chain, head gasket). The car was only worth around $4000, so I traded it in on a new car.
I don't understand this logic. You had to put up way more money to buy a new car. Unless you really want a new car, there is no cost justification for buying something brand new that will lose more than the value of your old car in less than a year.
At some point cars are so old and worn down that you're going to have to replace something every few months, and the maintenance costs explode – sure, you can completely refurbish the car, if you want to, but that's easily in the magnitude of a new car.
Labour costs to produce a new car on an assembly line are much lower than those of having two or three (skilled, but not necessarily familiar with your particular model) mechanics take your old car apart and test and reassemble it again.
That manufacturers sell spares at a premium and aren't interested in long-lived products doesn't help, but the basic problem remains.
> At some point cars are so old and worn down that you're going to have to replace something every few months, and the maintenance costs explode – sure, you can completely refurbish the car, if you want to, but that's easily in the magnitude of a new car.
I half agree. You are correct that cars will eventually wear out, but not in 150,000 miles. Most cars today can go over 300,000 miles with basic maintenance.
The original post stated the car needed $3000 work of work, which seems reasonable. If he had put that money into the car that repair would be good for another 150,000 miles - before he does it again. Now we have to assume another $3,000 (number pulled out of me head, but it seems reasonable) in other maintenance alone the way. So for $6,000 more he could have a car with 300,000 miles on it.
What did the new car cost? If we assume that he got the full $4,000 value on trade in (seems unlikely, but dealers often will not consider overdue maintenance in trade in value) plus the $3,000 he needed to pay, plus the $3,000 that the old car would need in maintenance, minus $1,000 for maintenance on the new car we can suggest that $10,000 comes off that price.
Did he make a bad decision? You need to decide which of my numbers above are valid before you can answer it. It is quite likely that buying a used off-lease car with 30,000 miles on it and trading it in after 100,000 miles is probably the cheapest option in the current market.
BTW, the dealer taking the trade-in above is not stupid. He isn't going to fix the car. He is going to ship it to Mexico, sell it for $4,200 with the note that it needs some work done. The buyer in Mexico has just saved up $4,500 for a car (this took a while) and he will do the work himself. (Even if he paid someone to do the work the cost would be much less than our $3,000 figure above)
> The original post stated the car needed $3000 work of work, which seems reasonable. If he had put that money into the car that repair would be good for another 150,000 miles - before he does it again. Now we have to assume another $3,000 (number pulled out of me head, but it seems reasonable) in other maintenance alone the way. So for $6,000 more he could have a car with 300,000 miles on it.
I doubt that the $3000 would have covered all necessary refurbishments to last every single component another 150,000 miles. Small bits here, small bits there accumulate over time (and have even higher labour cost overhead than refurbishing everything in one go).
> The buyer in Mexico has just saved up $4,500 for a car (this took a while) and he will do the work himself.
Dumping our problems on third-world countries with cheap labour is always the cheapest solution.
> I doubt that the $3000 would have covered all necessary refurbishments to last every single component another 150,000 miles. Small bits here, small bits there accumulate over time (and have even higher labour cost overhead than refurbishing everything in one go).
Depends on the car. I have 240,000 on my car, and so far the 150,000->300,000 jump is on track for about that. Tires for $500, Some AC work for $500, some brake work for $500. (I did a bunch of work myself, lets call if $500 for radiator hoses) There are some scratches that I'm ignoring but they are cosmetic. If you want to keep your car like new it will cost a lot more, but if you accept imperfections that do not hurt functionality the costs are lower.
Note, I'm assuming a good, honest mechanic. I had one quote me $4000, but the second opinion came in at $500 for the sensor and the brakes which is why the brakes were so high above - I didn't mention the other work done at the same time.
Typically though once you get to that stage the continued maintenance of keeping it on the road is going to quickly run more than the value of the car. If that work would get you another 5 years it would be worth it, usually though something else will be close to failure.
While you might think that a 14 year old 150K mile car is in pristine condition, that $3K of engine work was just the minimum I could spend to get the engine running and back on the road.
The air conditioning had stopped working, probably due to a bad compressor, one of the back windows wasn't working, the rear struts needed replaced, the power steering pump was making an awful racket when cold, the car was burning oil (which could have been the head gasket, or could have needed more engine work), the transmission needed work (it would sometimes take several shifts to get it to go into reverse, I tried to always park in pull-through spaces), it was nearly time for new tires, brakes needed serviced (and the master cylinder needed to be rebuilt). I don't even know if it would have passed a smog check due to the amount of oil it was burning. And that's just the problems I knew about.
Oh, and it was missing out on the past 14 years of car safety improvements (ABS, multiple air bags, etc) as well as modern emissions and fuel economy improvements. Meanwhile it was sitting at the shop and I was renting a car to get to work.
It really made no sense to keep it, so i visited a car dealer and got what I think was a good deal (with 0% financing) on a new car - they towed the car from my mechanic and I drove home in a brand new car, that 8 years later, has had zero problems (so far).
The "somehow" is that they sell us brand-new cars for relatively little money. If new cars cost a million bucks, we'd be keeping ancient cars on the road with gusto, just like we do with airplanes. But since cars are so much cheaper, the point where continuing maintenance efforts stop paying off is reached much sooner.
For a specialised work vehicle... maybe. But for a personal car, even if a 20yo one still works perfectly, I'd still replace it with a new one for fuel economy and safety features. We made some serious improvements in that time. 1970s cars are deathtraps in comparison. I mean, in the US ABS wasn't even enforced until 2013!
A car will last for decades if you're willing to pay for proper upkeep. But new cars are tremendously safer than those built 10+ years ago. Look at recent crash test videos. If you were going to be hit by a drunk driver which vehicle would you rather be in? The safety factor alone makes new cars more cost effective for many of us (depending on the value you place on your life and health).
Safety improvements in light aircraft have been far slower and more limited.
Some people have considered building "life cars" which are vehicles designed to run forever because all of their parts can be replaced. On the plus side you only need new tooling when the old tooling starts getting out of tolerance, on the negative side your car looks the same as it did in the 60s. So go back and look at cars in the 60's and ask yourself if the asthetic works for you.
So the next step is car chassis that last forever but the body can be replaced. Prior to unibody construction this is how a lot of cars were built. And the 1970's VW beetle chassis was used by lots of people as the starting point for a fiberglass re-make (look for 'VW kit car' in images and see what I mean) That fixes the "look" (sort of) but the body work and interior work is over half the cost of the car. So you don't save too much and do you keep tooling for the 10 year old bodies?
What about it? Such a car would always be just as safe as the day you bought it. One would have to sell new cars with the required level of safety equipment but it doesn't change the value proposition of a car that you can always get parts for. What are your thoughts about safety?
I presume the user meant that vehicle safety tends to improve over time: a modern car is substantially safer than a 1960s model can readily be modified to be, thanks to radical body redesigns as well as innovations like ABS that might be possible to retrofit. I'm not sure the rate of improvement in safety has been quite so large since the mid 90s, but certainly wouldn't rule out significant safety innovations over the next 30 or 40 years that couldn't be retrofitted to a chassis built this decade.
I presumed the same thing. Safety, like any requirement, cannot be applied retroactively. It does not invalidate the concept of a product that is maintainable in its useful state indefinitely.
Cheap and readily available finance lures consumers into spending more than they need. Bigger newer houses, more medical tests than necessary, more expensive university, graduate degrees, etc. And then others want to keep up with peers so they get lured in too.
If you go outside the US cars will be noticeably older, even rich countries, but still serving their purpose just fine.
Helicopters, like all flying machines, have much stricter safety regulations while also being extremely low volume. This means that for every part that goes into a production aircraft R&D, tooling setup, and testing will far outweigh the cost of materials, machine time, and assembly. This is very different from an a car where the cost of goods sold (materials, manufacturing, and assembly) is many times more than the sunk costs.
For example, if I wanted to make 30 complex six layer PCBs it can cost on the order of $9,000 at $300 per board. Realistically, $8,000 of that is the cost of labor for setting up all of the machines for the production run but if I wanted to make 1,000 of them the price can drop to $30 or less per board because the static setup cost is now spread across many more units. In aviation, every part is essentially custom and not made very often so you have no choice but to pay that huge overhead every time someone orders a chopper unless you a) batch together manufacturing (large inventory cost and risk) or b) maintain the machinery so that it's always set up to make your parts (large capital equipment underutilization cost). Either way you've got overhead that costs much more than the parts and is unavoidable. If you're lucky you can buy the machining equipment and save lots of money by renting out time like Boeing does with their multimillion dollar five axis machining centers which make very precise turbine blades for a variety of applications like power plants and dams. This rarely makes sense for a business to do however, because then they've got two businesses to worry about.
People are so used to cheap mass manufactured goods that many don't realize just how much more it costs to make anything custom.
Seems like there is an opportunity here? Presumably milling machines and so on will start to reduce this overhead, so that the overhead becomes just the cost of creating the original design?
Come to think of it, there might be some opportunity in standardization. I'm not an aviation engineer so what I say may make no sense, but a good enough set of "bricks" that would let you assemble anything from small twin-seater to a passenger plane would benefit from economies of scale, even if initially such a design would be more expensive and less performant than a custom build.
I guess since it isn't already happening, I'm probably missing something obvious.
Weight and balance is critical for airplanes. You can design the bricks, but you can't stick them together in any combination because a brick that will hold the tail wings for a 400 passenger plane is too heavy for a 100 passenger plane: the plane will not balance right and always be in nose up stall.
Also, there are not enough airplanes made. Even if the bricks idea can work, we still wouldn't make enough to give it significant enough economics of scale.
Helicopters are extremely weight limited. In order to allow for any sort of useful payload, all of the airframe parts have to be designed for a specific model (or range of very similar models). The shapes and mechanical properties needed aren't well suited to highly automated mass production.
Avionics and engines are somewhat standardized "bricks", though.
Robbos are 'cheap' up-front because they're built for a 12-year / 2,200 flying-hour service life; they're basically disposable helicopters. They can be overhauled and rebuilt at that point, and every subsequent 2,200 hours, but it's expensive.
Furthermore here are some service-life-hours comparisons between components on an R22 and an Enstrom F-28C of the same category ( edit: updated from the FAA TCDS ):
Source: an acquaintance who runs a training school with R22s. He loves flying them but sells them on ASAP when they're anywhere near their service life.
Incidentally Mr Robinson originally designed the R22 with a target list-price of $22,000, hence the name.
Most of what I have seen comes from the Instagram feed of Bradley Friesen who seems to have some pretty awesome pictures of where he's able to land his R44. Makes me want to move to BC.
I expect that to be on the low side, given it is information from the manufacturer, and given that I spotted one white lie: they get at the $140 by assuming 8 gallons per hour, then derive $0.90 per mile from that, but casually mention a speed that uses 9.5 gallons per hour at cruise speed. A tiny difference on that $/mile figure, but it would add about $8 to the 'dollar per hour' number.
My brother-in-law (was a Navy Chief) mentioned once that one in six Navy takeoffs had a mechanical failure of some kind. He always took a boat to shore when on carrier duty. So maintenance surely varies across the services.
Think about anything that might be used on a well site in the Bakken (generators, light towers, pick up trucks, drill pipe, drilling rigs, yellow construction equipment etc.) and it's pretty cheap right now...
Another luxury goods market that's reporting a significant decline. Private planes are also down a lot, real estate in Manhattan is dropping. SF real estate not dropping, but not increasing as it used to either. Spending on luxury goods down a lot. Let's go down the list:
Gold prices up ... check. Lots of money flowing (or attempting to) into government bonds ... check. Corporate profits down ... check. Corporate lending up by a LOT ... check. Energy down (demand-side problem) ... check. Goods shipping down (a lot) ... check. Lending standards tightening ... check (except for central bank lending). Spending down ... check. Bankruptcies up ... check. Luxury goods markets down ... check. Asset prices generally going donw ... check. "Sin" stocks rising (alcohol, gambling, ...) ... hmmm ... yes, sort of ... not yet totally pervasive (although CSH is doing almost suspiciously well)
We're in a recession ! Also : f*ck, I was looking at changing my job around.
And ... major wtf: stock prices ... all time high. That's weird.
One of the weird things about the stock market is that its success is no longer in any sort of relationship with economic reality. The economy continues to hobble around, and economic growth is not only low, it may be permanently stunted.
But the S&P 500, Dow, and Nasdaq all closed at historic highs today - the first time all three have on the same day in 17 years. [0] Does the US economy and consumer confidence (and hell, general health of the middle class) feel at all like we should be seeing record market highs?
The way I would put it - a delicate framing - is that the market is honest, not correct. The situation is such that most people think they can stay in a little longer even as the analysts are pointing to all sorts of warning signs. There is always theater around the economy in election years, and they might succeed again in propping things up for the next president to handle.
[1] http://www.city-data.com/forum/automotive/503914-mig-21-ebay...