Avia Blog

For the established manufacturers, the light sport evolution has presented an opportunity and a dilemma. The opportunity is that LSAs might gin up the market for certified aircraft by offering buyers a low cost of admission. The dilemma? How to capitalize on that. Do you leave LSAs to the upstarts or build your own? Cessna built its own, Cirrus stuck a toe in the LSA water and withdrew it—or at least delayed the plunge—and now comes Piper with the announcement that it will offer the former Czech Aircraft Works SportCruiser as a rebranded PiperSport. The announcement came at the U.S. Sport Aviation Expo in January in Sebring, Florida. Piper’s new CEO, Kevin Gould, explained that buying and marketing someone else’s design made more sense than spending hard-to-come-by developmental dollars to ultimately build an airplane that’s not much different from the dozens already out there. Point taken.

In a 2007 study going back more than 50 years, a Boeing safety group identified inflight loss of control as the number one source of airline fatalities. The 2008 Nall Report tells a similar story for general aviation. Loss of control inflight, or LOC-I in the argot of those who study aircraft accidents, includes a host of hazards ranging from garden-variety stalls to control surface hardovers and encounters with wake turbulence. LOC- I accidents happen to the spectrum of civilian pilots, from students to airline veterans. The stubbornness of LOC-I as the single largest cause of fatal accidents has a great deal to do with the way that we train. While the airlines have incorporated a number of loss-of-control scenarios in their training, general aviation hasn’t really addressed the issue.

Despite being one of the bigger players in LSA market, Tecnam Aircraft isn’t well known in the U.S. The company has actually been building aircraft and aircraft parts for over 60 years, and has 3000 aircraft flying worldwide. For comparison, Cirrus Aircraft and Diamond Aircraft have each delivered slightly over 4000 airplanes to date. Tecnam is reorganizing in the U.S. with a new website (www.tecnam.net), an expanding dealer and support network and a new aircraft: the Tecnam P2006T light twin. The P2006T (That name doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, does it?) has specs more like a single than a twin. Its gross weight is only 2601—50 pounds more than a Cessna 172SP—and cruise speed is in the 140- to 150-knot range. The really novel item is that the P2006T sports two Rotax 912 S3 engines. The S3 is the certified version of the Rotax found in most LSAs. Each engine puts out about 100 HP.