CEO of Mooney

[NewMoon]

On 5/1/2024 at 8:08 AM, Pinecone said:

Everyone jumped on me when I suggested he do a monthly or quarterly state of Mooney post/email.

Now, we are mushrooms

Thar doesn't sound unreasonable to me. 

[PT20J]

If there were good news, we’d hear about it. The fact that Jonny is silent means that there is no good news to share. Do you really need the details? 

[LANCECASPER]

At the moment if they updated us every month or quarter they would be telling us how many Mooneys they serviced or how many of which parts they sold. Why would they do that? They aren't a public company. We aren't shareholders. 

If they come up with the money to do the gross weight increase on long body Mooneys or the NXi update for G1000 owners I'm sure we'll hear something. Neither of these apply to most Mooney owners. I'm not holding my breath on either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooney_International_Corporation#External_links

The corporation that is Mooney today hasn't sold most of us our airplanes. The ownership history is complicated, but I think only if you are one of less than 100 owners who bought a Mooney after 2014 when they started producing again, have you bought an airplane from the current Mooney. In other words they don't owe most of us anything. Yet every part that people have sweated over (Eaton no-back springs, etc) they've always come through with eventually. 

[Jetpilot86]

On 5/2/2024 at 6:53 AM, bcg said:

Cirrus understands marketing.  They know that selling to the pilot's is as important as, and sometimes more than, selling to the pilot and so they don't market the airplane, they market the comfort features and the safety.  My wife would be interested in a Cirrus just because of the 2nd door, something that seems kind of trivial to me as a pilot is a big deal to her as a passenger.

In total fairness though, I don't know how a new Mooney could be price competitive in the current labor market.  So much of it is hand made and the labor pool for that work has gotten both smaller and more expensive.  They'd have to either figure out a way to automate a lot of the production ($$$$) or come up with a new design that could be built with composites and modern automation ($$$$$$$).  There's not money for any of those options and with GA as a whole dwindling, it wouldn't be a good investment even if there was.  Sticking with the TBM project would probably have kept them in the black and producing airplanes but, that wasn't to be.

Count me as another one who just learned why I like TBM’s so much. 

[tony]

On 5/1/2024 at 9:09 AM, Greg Ellis said:

Not knowing about this side of the aviation world, what happens to the FAA production certificate and the type certificates on our airplanes, etc...if Mooney completely folds and goes beyond just a zombie company and becomes no company at all?  Forgive my ignorance in this but I am curious.

They become the property of the FAA.

[cliffy]

Time marches on-

You can't go home again.

We don't fly biplanes anymore like we did in the 1920s

Anymore than a sheet metal, hand built airplane out of the 1950s is viable as

a marketable product today compared to the industry leader Cirrus with

a plastic airframe (regardless of performance).

The technology moves on as does the market.

We can have our heads buried in the sand from nostalgia of things that were BUT

that won't change the market place demand.

Take a hard look at who and why they are buying new plastic airplanes.

Ponding rivets into sheet metal has no future as a wide marketable product

That's just the hard reality of a marketplace (and populace) moving on in technology. 

[A64Pilot]

If you look at a Cirrus they should take a fraction of the time to build.

Fuselage pops out of a mold and is glued together, no retract mechanisms, not even a steerable nose wheel to build parts for, rig etc. I heard  here that there even isn’t a mechanical elevator trim.

Do they even have Jigs? Or do the wings etc glue together like a model airplane? I have never toured the plant.

It seems that you should be able to build a Cirrus at a fraction of the man hours it takes to build a C-172 even, and yet I think the 22 is a Million dollar airplane? Yet it takes that apparently to be profitable.

[cliffy]

1 hour ago, A64Pilot said:

Yet it takes that apparently to be profitable.

Its called 'Liability Insurance"  cost

[toto]

On 6/8/2024 at 2:01 PM, cliffy said:

Ponding rivets into sheet metal has no future as a wide marketable product

That's just the hard reality of a marketplace (and populace) moving on in technology.

I’m not competent enough in the topic to disagree with what you’re saying here, but there are definitely examples of current metal aircraft designs that compete with composites. The Beech Denali and the Cessna Skycourier are both new metal designs. And Epic has a nice turboprop, but it’s not making TBM or Piper’s single engine turboprop business go away. 

Kit builders vote with their money, and there are still a lot of builders buying metal designs even decades after composite kits became available. 

I tend to think that the whole single-engine market has gotten so small that it’s not easily possible to draw many conclusions from the purchase stats. When your entire subject demographic is people who can drop a million dollars on a toy, it feels like it can’t be representative of the market as a whole. 

[cliffy]

I'm basically referring to a mass market product like the industry produced 40 to 50 years ago. 

Rivets and sheet metal were all the industry had back then That's all the market knew or understood.

The market is now fragmented into niche areas (Sport aircraft, experimental niches like RVs, STOL, Ultralights, plastics, etc)

The market that used to be available to manufacturers (Cessna, Piper) is now so small that we will never see a return

to what was. 

The current metal offerings are for very small markets themselves as we try to resurrect  a  mass market product from 4 decades ago-

our beloved Mooney. The numbers of buyers and the financials just aren't there anymore to support the effort. 

As much as we'd like to see it - it ain't gonna happen. 

The main market we had for rivets a sheet metal has moved on to other forms.

[EricJ]

FWIW, Cessna still cranks out a fair number of fixed-gear singles from C172s to C206s, Caravans, etc., that are still sheet metal and rivets.

Piper cranks out a pretty fair number of PA-28-ish airplanes (including the Pilot100) every year, too, as well as various flavors of PA-46, etc.

There are other examples as well.    

The technology isn't dead, it's just that the market for four-seat retractable-gear singles is dead.

[Planegary]

I wonder what it would take for the company to produce stiff leg mooneys again 

[PT20J]

https://gama.aero/wp-content/uploads/2023ShipmentReport-03-08.pdf

[DCarlton]

Where will we be in another 20-25 years.  Not everyone wants to fly a Cirrus, 182, or fly behind a ROTAX.  Keep those Mooney parts coming somehow!

BTW, side note, when talking the future of aircraft around the airport, no one ever says how great Cirrus are; you must get one.  It's the other way around (I hear junk, hard to insure, hard to work on, etc).  Maybe it's like Taylor Swift; if you're not a big fan, you going to bash them just because they are so popular.   I really don't known if I'd want to own one or not, but I do really like Mooney's.    

[N201MKTurbo]

I think the days of new production Mooneys has passed. I think Mooney should reinvent itself as a McFairlane or Univair. If it wants to keep its factory, they should do some contract manufacturing. Maybe not aviation related.

[dkkim73]

5 minutes ago, N201MKTurbo said:

 If it wants to keep its factory, they should do some contract manufacturing. Maybe not aviation related.

When I visited in February, they were doing outside contract manufacturing. There is a lot of tooling capability and space there. Felt like few people, but sounded like a lot of them were highly-skilled. And there was a parts cage with parts they continue to make for Mooneys. 

[Danb]

4 hours ago, PT20J said:

https://gama.aero/wp-content/uploads/2023ShipmentReport-03-08.pdf

Love those stats 

[Shadrach]

4 hours ago, PT20J said:

https://gama.aero/wp-content/uploads/2023ShipmentReport-03-08.pdf

This was eye opening. I knew Cirrus was dominating the piston single market but had no idea their sales were nearing a billion annually. They are delivering piston recips at 1960s production levels every year. 
 

[WilliamR]

4 hours ago, DCarlton said:

Where will we be in another 20-25 years.  Not everyone wants to fly a Cirrus, 182, or fly behind a ROTAX.  Keep those Mooney parts coming somehow!

BTW, side note, when talking the future of aircraft around the airport, no one ever says how great Cirrus are; you must get one.  It's the other way around (I hear junk, hard to insure, hard to work on, etc).  Maybe it's like Taylor Swift; if you're not a big fan, you going to bash them just because they are so popular.   I really don't known if I'd want to own one or not, but I do really like Mooney's.    

Funny, many of my friends say how great Cirrus' are. They have flown Cirrus' unlike most haters. They also ask why I still own my antiquated, orphaned Mooney. I've personally wrenched on Cirrus' helping an IA friend. They are not complicated or tight to work on. Once Cirrus went to G3 or 4, handling (feel of side yoke) got better, based on my experience.

Frankly, I've found Mooney quality as mid. 

 

[Shadrach]

23 minutes ago, WilliamR said:

Frankly, I've found Mooney quality as mid. 

Do tell? What areas is the build quality “mid”? What year is your Mooney?  Given the tech at the time they were designed, I think they show remarkably well.

[Skates97]

1 hour ago, Shadrach said:

This was eye opening. I knew Cirrus was dominating the piston single market but had no idea their sales were nearing a billion annually. They are delivering piston recips at 1960s production levels every year. 
 

Apparently GA isn't dead, it's just become an exponentially more expensive club. 

[hammdo]

100%…

-Don

[Shadrach]

3 hours ago, Skates97 said:

Apparently GA isn't dead, it's just become an exponentially more expensive club. 

Yup.  Cirrus delivered 612 piston recips in 2023. In 1967, Mooney delivered 751 aircraft.
In 1967 my F cost ~ $200k in today’s money.   They made 149 M20C’s, 62 M20E’s, 536 M20F’s and 4 M22 Mustangs. I was not around for that economy but it must have been very different from today.

[cliffy]

11 hours ago, PT20J said:

https://gama.aero/wp-content/uploads/2023ShipmentReport-03-08.pdf

Many years ago at a flyin presentation just before the 2 door model came out I was told by them that they had the ability a to design a fixed gear that would only cut

2 MPH off of the top speed. 

The amount of effort and money needed to bring out the 2 door model caught them by surprise (FAA) and probably doomed the company.

Bonus question=   How many 2 door airplanes rolled out of the factory? 

[toto]

21 minutes ago, cliffy said:

Bonus question=   How many 2 door airplanes rolled out of the factory? 

I'm guessing .. less than 10?

I actually thought the two-door aircraft were almost peerless in the field.  An Acclaim Ultra for $795k was a heck of a lot of airplane for the money, especially when compared with $1M+ for a loaded SR22.  The problem with the Ultras is that there were so many questions about factory viability right when they were doing a big marketing splash to launch the new models.

Sinking money into the M10 was probably the right move, and getting a legit foothold in the trainer market could well have spurred more step-up buyers to the M20s.  But they just seemed to run out of money right when they needed to be closing sales, and if I were a buyer in that market, I would have been nervous.

It's easy to Monday-morning QB this all now, but if they had had a press release saying they got a $100M infusion to modernize the factory and announce the two-door M20s, that might have helped ease any concerns about viability.  But announcing the Ultras right after spending a ton of money developing the M10 and then canceling it might have doomed the M20s.

I really enjoyed learning about this period from Ron Blum's posts here on MS and in the Mooney Flyer, and it's a shame we can't hear more from him today.