Cessna building airplanes in China now

by philg

Given that a lot of airplane construction methods are unchanged since World War II, I had always wondered why planes weren’t manufactured in China. Considerable hand labor is required to rivet together a metal airplane and even composite (plastic) plane factories seem to be humming with people.

http://www.cessna.com/news/article.chtml?ID=Xdg9EKUhsb1cI57ikmmGK7x13mhGGCol9paNMmg7MllCu8ZuHg

breaks the news that Cessna’s new Light Sport Aircraft (visual flight only; two seats; similar numbers to an ancient Cessna 150 or 152 except that you lose the capability of instrument flying) will be made in China, thus saving $71,000 per plane (according to Avweb). The plane will retail for about $110,000.

4 thoughts on “Cessna building airplanes in China now”

  1. Why do you loose the ability to use it for IFR flight? Other LSAs are ok for IFR and this is surely aimed at the trainer market. It is unlikely that Cessna will fail to make the SkyCatcher IFR capable.

  2. Why no IFR? Most simply because Cessna is not certifying it for IFR. Modern IFR certified airplanes seem to have a lot of redundancy: two COMs, two GPSes, two attitude indicators (the glass panel plus a steam gauge backup to paper over the C programmers’ mistakes), two alternators (or at least a lot of backup batteries), alternate static source, pitot heat, etc. If you crammed all of that into the Cessna 162 you wouldn’t have much payload left.

  3. So, since they are saving $71k on the labor, and since about 25% of the cost of a typical single engin airplane is liability insurance (I don’t have a reference for that, but was told this by a Cessna rep in the late 90s), I take it the price of the current plane is about half liability insurance. The LSA regs and outsourced manufacturing is one thing, but if we want to have affordable airplanes, we’re going to have to have tort reform.

  4. Diamond announced (http://www.diamondair.com/news/04_25_05.php) in April ’05 that they would build planes in China, too but I haven’t heard anything about their success. I’m sure that Cessna is not only trying to save labor costs but also expecting to capture the demand for pilot training in China. There’s an amusing story about a CFI moving to China for three months to train at PanAm but who never was able to fly due to regulations. http://www.worldtrip.ca/china.html

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