“The base price for the TRAC is $409,900 and can reach $541,500 with all the TRAC20 packages selected.”. The TRAC appears to be a wee bit too much of an airplane to be a trainer. Maybe after the Generation X aircraft are all but gone. My prediction is that the TRAC ain’t gonna fly as a trainer.
At that price break, this will never be a primary trainer. With C150/152s and Cherokee 140s drying up and 172s not far behind what is needed, yes it’s been said before, is a two-place primary trainer under 100k.
The flying school at the small local airport I fly out of can’t even afford that.
Price is high but look what you get for your money. A simple (not complex) fast, Lycoming powered 4 seat plane. Negatives are a tricky handling plane while low and slow (really bad for beginners), requires perpetual shade hangers (composites), disposable plane safety features, High insurance and high cost so maintenance, and long landings. Worst of all, 3 green lights is NOT a simulation of retractable gear!! Which bulb changes the stability, which bulb adds or subtracts 15 knots, and which bulb alters the pitch. I can wait to see the spin training. Sorry, but as an instructor with Cirrrus experience, I do not see good basic training coming from this incompetent trainer. It will do even worse as a HP/complex trainer. But, at this price, ballistic parachute and all, I see good sales and high profits margins.
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I don’t think there will be many flight schools that will or can layout a half millin bucks for one of these. I’d love to know what the hourly cost of operation will be. Nope, don’t think it will do well as a trainer.
Absolutely, 100% correct. And as a student, other then the wow factor, it wouldn’t be sensible to train in an aircraft like this.
Cirrus was bought out by CAIGA, a division of the Chinese state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). Maybe the TRAC is intended for them. Who knows?
The TRAC is meant for captive training by airlines and their subsidary training facilities. A closer match for the replacements of the ubiquitous C-150 or PA-28 was also recently announced in AvWeb, the Texas Aircraft Manufacturing Colt:
The Colt features an all-metal riveted design with an integrated steel-tube cage around the occupants. With a 100-HP Rotax 912 ULS under the hood, the Colt carries a claimed 110-knot cruise, 800-FPM maximum climb, and a 38-knot full-flap stall speed. Empty weight is listed as 839 pounds, so with the fuel tanks full (31.7 gallons), the payload is just over 290 pounds. Prices start at $167,000.
The Bye Aerospace eFlyer makes way more sense as a basic trainer. Total costs (purchase, insurance, fuel, maintenance) somewhere less than $30/hour, and happier airport neighbors due to quieter operation and no 100LL spewing out the tailpipe. Which is why they already have 300 orders with deliveries starting next year.
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And how many FLIGHT hours per day will this electric airplane deliver? UTILIZATION is the key to success.
IMWO, a candidate trainer needs to have a fuel capacity sufficient for 4:30 cruise, AND a zero-fuel payload of at least 500 pounds. That puts the useful load into 700+ pounds territory. Not very likely at much less than 1,900 pounds gross.
George, I couldn’t agree with you more about the Cirrus’s Trac NOT having a landing gear simulator. I know because I worked on the subject, and I earned some FAA acceptance. FMI see this story from 2009…
http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=39c27c99-8789-4995-bee0-527bb65a232c
Who says new technology moves fast?
Greg
If they are a public company all that should be public information with the FTC. Except of course the political connections.
Not true. It’s a function of RF physics. Ligato is the resurrection of the old LightSquared creationirirriir of Phil Harbin, who contributed vast amounts to Obama and convinced the FCC to permit terrestrial high power use of the GPS guardband which it bought at a spectrum auction for cheap. GPS signals are very low power and ultra-high precision GPS equipment, including farm planting equipment all depend on the harmonics lobes being heard. This includes WAAS GPS signals. A single transmitter test performed in the 2010 decade demonstrated conclusively the use of this spectrum which is designated low power sat-phone and orbit-terrestrial signals wiped out a 1500 nm radius area of aviation GPS signals at a test power at the transmitter of less than 10% of what Lightsquared proposed in its petition for FCC waiver. Based on this data and input from GA alphabet groups, DOD, Dept of Agriculture and just about everyone using GPS, the FCC finally killed the waiver. Legato bought the ashes of LightSquared and now proposes exactly the same claiming a reinterpretation of the data demonstrates it can do what it wants without destructive interference. The physics of RF generation and propagation has not changed. Doing what Legato/Lightsquared proposed is like running an unmuffled lawnmower in a library and claiming the library was cheaply soundproofed.
Don’t forget us peons worry about how many might die in a plane wreck, even the ones not related to us.
There are plenty of fights worth fighting over language drift, but I wouldn’t die on the hill of plurality here. We might be winning the war over literally, or at least holding the line until we die of natural causes.
“ “…but some of the gear used by the U.S. military could be significantly affected by the 5G signals.”
So significantly affected, that the military want to use 5G on the battlefield:
“The U.S. Department of Defense, specifically, is interested in 5G as a means to rapidly share information — on and off the battlefield — and improve logistics, like at so-called smart warehouses, where artificial intelligence and remote observation come into play. The department’s 2020 strategy described 5G as “far more disruptive” than its predecessors, noting that high-speed connectivity will “transform the way militaries operate.”
That data is more detailed than this data. However these data were measured and recorded on the same instrument.
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Or is it those data?