I've always thought that there were simply not enough of us that like this kind of plane to make them profitable. Trying to stuff more horsepower into them to make them fly faster, and appeal to more pilots, gets into the whole Hp/weigh spiral thing. Efficiency then goes down and cost goes up.
^This.
I know I'm going to get into a lot of hot water from power pilots with this post,
but here goes.
Simply
flying a power plane is
boring. Once you've mastered flying to the point that you're comfortable and it's second-nature, what then? Just circle around? I remember being up in a Traumahawk once, at the base of the Cajon Pass north of San Bernardino, realizing that flying this thing with nowhere to go was about like driving a car around on the world's biggest empty parking lot.
Yawn.
So just "flying around" up there, by yourself, isn't really what a lot of guys want to do. It gets old, quickly. I suspect that far more pilots than one might expect feel exactly as I do. So you find something
else to do with an airplane. If you want to know what a market is really like, watch what people actually
buy. In single-seat airplanes, here it is:
-
- Aerobatic Ships - Here the goal isn't simply to fly, but to actually do something that you can't do any other way.
- Soaring - Again, flying as challenge. There isn't a moment in soaring that you're not being challenged by the weather and gravity. Want to stay up? You have to be good at it. You can't just push the throttle forward.
- Puddle Jumpers - Little single-seaters (Pops' airplane is the perfect example) that are just for buzzing over to your friend's house a few miles away, popping up in the sunset to experience the moment, fly to the local airshow or airport café. You're not going anywhere fast, and that's okay, 'cause it just doesn't matter.
- Ultralights - Here the goal is to fly without involvement with "The Man". Many of these aircraft are being used as the 'Puddle Jumpers' are above, but without that pesky license and registration nonsense. It should be obvious from history that, given their choice, a lot of ultralight fliers would have a second seat if the rules allowed it. Given the lengths so many of them went to in order to justify a second seat under the old "training" exemption, they seem to want it so bad that even bending the rules was seen as acceptable.
Note that none of these aircraft are particularly fast, with the exception of really top-end competition sailplanes - and that's a function of their ability to
race, not some ability to make power-plane-style cross-country trips.
That's the market for single-seaters, as demonstrated by people actually voting with their wallets. Who else buys single-seaters, and much more commonly of a type close to the old ARV concept? Low-time pilots who are first-time builders, that's who. They just want an airplane of their own, maybe cheaper (or at least more interesting) than a used C-152. But when you've got it... Now what? You can fly to get that $100 burger in the next state.
Alone. You can take a nice weekend trip.
Alone. You can go to the big national airshow 500 miles away.
Alone. Range and speed only make sense in the context of
going somewhere. Range and speed in a single seater only make sense in the context of wanting to go somewere
alone. People are social creatures. We don't generally work that way. So what you see is that, of the airplanes in this class that actually get finished, most of them fly around for maybe fifty or a couple hundred hours, and then they end up gathering dust in the corner of a hangar or garage for years. Then they're either broken up or put up for sale, whereupon another low-time pilot buys it and the cycle repeats. I'd be amazed if any large number of these airframes make it to the first TBO of their engine before fading into dust and rust.
IMHO, the ARV concept makes sense in one context, and one context only:
The flying club. Either the club builds a whack of them or you have one so that you can go on the group flights with the rest of the club without having to ride "shotgun". I could see an ARV-style aircraft finding a home in such an environment.
