This Don't Look Good

[GeeBee]

The DOT is handing out free money for "Covid Relief". A veritable who's who aviation took the money. Guess who is missing

 

https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2022-02/AMJP_Eligible_Recipients.pdf

 

[hammdo]

You'd think Mooney would get in on this...

-Don

[Fly Boomer]

Also no Cessna (Textron), Beech (Textron), Piper, Boeing...

May be some unpleasant strings.

[hammdo]

Or Garmin, Honeywell...

-Don

[StevenL757]

24 minutes ago, hammdo said:

You'd think Mooney would get in on this...

-Don

True.  But my guess is you'd have to have jobs to apply for $$ to protect jobs.

With 15 or so employees, tho, I agree they should have gotten in on it.  My small avionics shop is even on the list (Islip Avionics).

Edited February 15, 2022 by StevenL757

[thinwing]

heres a good one.....firefly balloons....newest production number I could find was in 2008...meaning they havent bult a balloon in over 14 years!....9k to support 1 employee...probably the owner

[GeeBee]

Cirrus banked 8 million

 

[EricJ]

1 hour ago, Fly Boomer said:

Also no Cessna (Textron), Beech (Textron), Piper, Boeing...

May be some unpleasant strings.

Not Boeing, Spirit, which got the biggest payout on the sheet of $75.5M.   Boeing doesn't make that stuff any more, they're a finance company now. 

[GeeBee]

I would have thought Mooney would have qualified. My daughter is a corporate banker and has done a lot of these loans for her clients, some of whom you would recognize. They are likely to be forgiven if you comply with the program. They are basically free money.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-offers-69-million-aviation-160233798.html

 

The money line....To qualify, a company must have involuntarily furloughed or laid off at least 10% of its total workforce, or experienced a decline of at least 15% in 2020 total operating revenue.

 

[A64Pilot]

Thrush aircraft also wasn’t in there.

 I wonder how it was decided who got the money? Cirrus, really? Did they send the money straight to China?

[A64Pilot]

Mooney had 229 employees? That’s way more than I would have thought, way more

[GeeBee]

50 minutes ago, A64Pilot said:

Thrush aircraft also wasn’t in there.

 I wonder how it was decided who got the money? Cirrus, really? Did they send the money straight to China?

You had to apply for the money and you had to apply through a bank. Those businesses that did not have good relationships with a bank, languished. The program was administered through the banks. Now, if a bank has a huge stack of applications to process (and they did) which applications are you going to move first. Your regular customers or some guy who just came through the door?

[A64Pilot]

7 hours ago, GEE-BEE AEROPRODUCTS said:

 

Does anyone learn from the past ?

No, 

 But this one will hurt me more than the last one did

Edited February 16, 2022 by A64Pilot

[Mcstealth]

14 hours ago, A64Pilot said:

Mooney had 229 employees? That’s way more than I would have thought, way more

Back in the day, Mooney supplied over 500 jobs for the community. 

[A64Pilot]

22 hours ago, Mcstealth said:

Back in the day, Mooney supplied over 500 jobs for the community. 

I wonder what their production rate was, We built one airplane a week with 85 employees, including office staff and engineering, plant maintenance etc. Much bigger, but less complex aircraft. Why did they still have over 200 without any production? 

If they could sell them, I think one a week could bring Mooney back off of life support?

[LANCECASPER]

34 minutes ago, A64Pilot said:

I wonder what their production rate was, We built one airplane a week with 85 employees, including office staff and engineering, plant maintenance etc. Much bigger, but less complex aircraft. Why did they still have over 200 without any production? 

If they could sell them, I think one a week could bring Mooney back off of life support?

Mooney's best year volume-wise was 1966 with 760 produced. That was  just under 15 per week.

In 1977 they sold 409, 377 of which were the just-introduced 201. About 8 per week.

In 1979, 383 sold, 246 of which were the new 231 model.

The last year they sold 100 was 2000 (55 Ovations, 26 Bravos and 19 Eagles)

- - - - -

It costs a lot per unit to build one airplane at a time. I would think that they'd have to finish at least a couple a week to have any kind of efficiency. If a big name company bought Mooney to infuse customer confidence I have no doubt they would sell. The first thing they should do is hire away one of the Cirrus marketing guys - to create the Mooney lifestyle. Airplanes are selling. Cirrus, Cessna, Piper etc are sold out for over a year.

[WilliamR]

On 2/15/2022 at 9:21 PM, GeeBee said:

You had to apply for the money and you had to apply through a bank. Those businesses that did not have good relationships with a bank, languished. The program was administered through the banks. Now, if a bank has a huge stack of applications to process (and they did) which applications are you going to move first. Your regular customers or some guy who just came through the door?

Actually, what you are describing is the paycheck protection program (PPP). Those were actually loans administered by banks on behalf of the gv't that typically had a 2-5 year tenor and preferential structures for companies that met certain criteria. Note, I seem to remember there were certain circumstances where the loan could be fully or partially forgiven. However, whenever I analyze a company, I always consider it senior debt. 

The program described in the article is not a loan program, it's a grant where you applied through a DOT portal.

So, this is more money into the economy that already has material inflation. It's not much, < $3 Bn, but it certainly isn't a deflationary action.

William

 

[flyboy0681]

I have read several articles about these programs and thus far the estimates are showing that well over $100 billion was doled out to fraudsters. The Washington Post had a story just today about the waste, fraud and abuse of the program and highlighted a guy who pleaded guilty to "taking" $4 million and spending it on a lavish lifestyle which included a fleet of high-end cars.

Who would have thunk?

[A64Pilot]

All I know is of you keep giving away money, eventually someone has to pay in one fashion or another.

[flyboy0681]

2 minutes ago, A64Pilot said:

All I know is of you keep giving away money, eventually someone has to pay in one fashion or another.

In this case me, who was gainfully employed throughout it all and earned too much to get one of the three "stimulus" checks.

[Mooneymite]

3 minutes ago, A64Pilot said:

All I know is of you keep giving away money, eventually someone has to pay in one fashion or another.

Nah....not if it's imaginary money.  Only if it's something real.  Imaginary money can be created on your computer screen; no need to even print it any more.

[A64Pilot]

6 hours ago, LANCECASPER said:

Mooney's best year volume-wise was 1966 with 760 produced. That was  just under 15 per week.

In 1977 they sold 409, 377 of which were the just-introduced 201. About 8 per week.

In 1979, 383 sold, 246 of which were the new 231 model.

The last year they sold 100 was 2000 (55 Ovations, 26 Bravos and 19 Eagles)

- - - - -

It costs a lot per unit to build one airplane at a time. I would think that they'd have to finish at least a couple a week to have any kind of efficiency. If a big name company bought Mooney to infuse customer confidence I have no doubt they would sell. The first thing they should do is hire away one of the Cirrus marketing guys - to create the Mooney lifestyle. Airplanes are selling. Cirrus, Cessna, Piper etc are sold out for over a year.

Ideally yes, but if you keep overhead low and have pretty much no debt, you can survive as a “boutique” manufacturer with very low volume, and actually make pretty good money too.

Maule still struggles on, and they can only do so because last I heard they have essentially no debt, but I suspect there volume is so low that they are just hanging on.

Place I used to work the owner thought he was going to be the next Cessna or something and took the couple of contracts that had been a few years into making as some kind of thought about how things were going to be and started borrowing as much money as he could buying new software and any automated machine someone tried to sell him, thinking he could push production to high numbers and reap the profits from economy of scale, but the sales weren’t there and those contracts that he thought would continue year after year, didn’t.

Surprisingly it took about four years before final bankruptcy, I knew it was coming just surprised how long it took.

In my opinion if your going to manufacture aircraft you need to be in a position to ride out the bad times,because it’s very cyclical.

I’m sure airplanes are selling now, everything is selling and I mean everything houses, boats you name it. But if you think this is the new normal I’m afraid your wrong, we are living off of borrowed money and it won’t last.

Those that didn’t go crazy and put themselves into debt betting on continued high sales may survive, those borrowing like crazy to expand to fill the increased demand, may not.

 

[A64Pilot]

6 minutes ago, Mooneymite said:

Nah....not if it's imaginary money.  Only if it's something real.  Imaginary money can be created on your computer screen; no need to even print it any more.

There is actually a rather large group of people who believe that is true, that we can continue like this with no end, who knows maybe they are right? I certainly don’t know anything about economics, just gut instinct.

But I remember just about everyone telling me that you couldn’t lose money in buying a house too.

[Will.iam]

My experience with hyper inflation was while i was stationed in turkey where i joked to my friends i was a multi billionaire because $10= 1,000,000 TL 

the sad part was the turks gladly accepted  us currency as their TL dropped in value monthly from their government printing money to pay out debt. In 2006 the turkish government announced they were dropping 5 zeros off their bills so 20 TL new bill equaled $20 usd that lasted less than a month and by the time 4 months had passed that same 20TL could not buy $4 USD. How would you feel that by the time you get your money from your paycheck for work you did that month your salary was half of what it was the month before. Turkey is small compared to USA but I don’t think we are too big to fail especially if the rest of the world gets sick of us deflating our dollar to the point the oil industry gets off the USD standard for another currency that is more stable then we are screwed IMO. I hope I’m wrong. 

[A64Pilot]

I fell pretty sure that before the Gulf War that there was going to be a Petro dollar that oil was going to be bought with, but it was put aside as a way to pay us back for protecting “them”.  That’s just an opinion. Keeping the Petrodollar as US currency I believe supports the US Dollar.

If the US dollar becomes devalued, will they continue to base oil prices on it?

Edited February 18, 2022 by A64Pilot