I have been asked to provide my professional opinion about the future market for Vulcanair aircraft in the U.S.  I’m happy to provide you with the following.  As the fight training market is by far the largest market for piston-engine aircraft we will focus on this market.

Scope of market:

More than two years ago I started work on a forecast for the requirement for FAA certified four-seat single-engine training aircraft.  I started the project by reviewing the semi-annual Boeing 20 Year Commercial Aircraft Forecast.  In the last, published in 2018 there is a forecast of the need for almost 800,000 professional pilots in the next 20 years.  As you know there is an overwhelming current demand for professional pilots in all niches in aviation.

I then expanded the forecast to include my own research on the number of flight hours in aircraft that will be required to train that number of pilots.  The number is almost 200,000,000 hours in the 20-year period.  It’s likely that this number will be higher because of the additional time required for flight training of recreational and owner-flown business aircraft pilots but that number is harder to forecast.

The number also needs to be trimmed slightly because some of the training will be for multi-engine ratings.  That said, the number of multi-engine training is usually about 10-12 hours per commercial pilot student or 9,000,000 hours over the next 20 years.  The Vulcanair P68 can have a place in this market.

Need for single-engine aircraft:

The last decade that large numbers of training aircraft were produced was the 1970’s.  There were about 15,000 appropriate airframes made in that decade.  In the 1980’s there were only a few thousand manufactured, about 3,000.  The whole industry stopped manufacturing training aircraft in 1984.  The reason was because of the liability laws at the time and the long tail of responsibility for the aircraft manufactures.  The law changed in 1996 to limit the number of years the manufactures had a liability and the industry started manufacturing the aircraft again.  Since that time, almost 25 years, only a few thousand more have been manufactured, about 5,000.  Last year the industry, made up of Vulcanair (V1.0), Cessna (172), Piper (PA-28), Diamond (DA-40), Cirrus (SR-20) and Tecnam (P2010), manufactured approximately only 335 airframes.

I believe it is realistic to estimate that there are about 10,000 appropriate airframes currently in the world that are being used reliably in the training market.  Probably half of those are over 40 years old many of which have 5-10,000 hours on the aircraft already and are becoming no longer reliable for use in the training market due to high maintenance costs.  So, the industry needs to average almost 10,000,000 training hours per year divided between 10,000 aircraft.

If there are 10,000 aircraft that are being used for flight training, then the average aircraft is adding about 1,000 hours per year.  That means this fleet of 10,000 aircraft in the future need to be replaced every 10 years or there is a need for 1,000 new aircraft per year.  Also remember that most of the 10,000 current aircraft have thousands of hours already.  Therefore, you can see there is a need for several thousand aircraft right now.  Bottom line, there is a need to fill the void between the 335 airframes per year that are currently being manufactured and the 1,000+ airframes currently needed each year.

Summary:

There is a known huge market for new pilots.  It will require a significant number of new aircraft to train these pilots.  The supply of 2000 or newer trainers is small, probably less than 5,000 aircraft and many of those that have been used in the training market already have more than 5,000 hours.  The 1970 to 2000 aircraft will need to be retired in the next 10 years as most will have airframe times that will be exceeding 10,000 hours.  Another thing that will lead to the retirement of these 1970 to early 2000 airframes is the fact they have an older generation of avionics that are rapidly becoming obsolete to the professional pilot training market.

The U.S. training aircraft market will be owned by the company that produces a reliable but reasonably priced aircraft with very good customer service and a good financing program and a well thought out resale market.  Ameravia and Vulcanair can be that company!