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Why Inexpensive? Results and Conclusions

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Topaz

Super Moderator
Staff member
Joined
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Messages
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Location
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We've had many threads here on HBA that have discussed "inexpensive" airplanes. In fact, these have been some of the more popular and longest-running threads in recent years. It occurred to me to ask why that's the case, so I ran a series of polls here on the forum, and one of our members, skier, contributed another and re-posted one of mine over on the Pilots of America forum, where the pilots fly type-certificated aircraft almost exclusively. I've closed all the polls and have written up a summary of the results, and a few conclusions that it seems safe to draw from the data. I hope you enjoy seeing the results as much as I did.

Here are links to the various polls, so you can see the raw data and the associated discussions.

Why Inexpensive?: https://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25987

What is "inexpensive" for an airplane?: https://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26008

Airplane usage: https://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25995

Airplane usage, largely certified aircraft: https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/community/threads/you-have-an-airplane-you-use-it-for.98112/

Recurring costs: https://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26010

"Inexpensive" Airplane Characteristics: https://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26034

"Inexpensive" airplanes you LIKE, and why you WOULDN'T buy one: https://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26039

What do you weigh?: https://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26037

I want to preface this discussion with a few notes.

First off, this is not a professional marketing research exercise. I had a personal interest, and satisfied that interest with a group of simple polls. It wouldn't be a good idea to use this as exhaustive marketing research for any business purpose. It's just not good enough for that, and real market research wasn't my goal in the first place. However I noticed as I was writing this up that I kept slipping into the language of marketing research - forgive, please, any "formal sounding" parts.

Secondly, this data represents a tiny sample size, with just 20-50 people participating in any particular poll. The data is statistically unreliable by any reasonable measure. Don't blindly trust these results. They may be wrong, and so my conclusions may be wrong.

Thirdly, this exercise isn't intended to judge whether an "inexpensive" airplane or kit would be a profitable product. I've neglected the business-side of the equation entirely and simply looked at what the potential customers are really thinking. An engineer can legitimately say, looking at these results, that it's impossible to build a product for this segment, at the price they want, and still turn a profit. I neither agree nor disagree with that - it wasn't the point of the exercise. The point was to gain some insight into why "inexpensive" airplanes continue to be of such interest to a self-selected group of people (HBA members) who are interested in homebuilt airplanes as a whole. This is what they told me. I have drawn some inferences of my own from what they said, regarding what will and will not work if attempting to sell a product to people like this, and based on my knowledge of sales and marketing. Whether or not "it can be done" is completely irrelevant to my work here, and whether or not a profitable product can be created for this segment is therefore left as "an exercise for the reader." I'm just the messenger about what your potential customers want. Whether they're being realistic or not is most definitely a question for another day, and one that I can't answer anyway.

Fourth and last, suffice it to say that this data is for one very particular segment of the homebuilt market. There are other segments, and clearly those segments have their own rules and factors influencing sales. This exercise has little or no bearing on Van's Aircraft, Glassair, Lancair, or aircraft in any other market segment.
 
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