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The Skycatcher is ... catching on BY DAVE HIRSCHMAN

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AOPA PILOT. 60 •APRIL 2011

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AOPA PILOT· 61. APRIL 2011

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Sealed and locked in a

shipping container inChina, two Skycatchers ata time arrive in Wichita

after a long journey byocean, rail, and truck.Wooden crates beneatheach airframe contain the

Skycatcher wings andempennage. Once they areattached, the airplanes

are almost ready fortheir first flights atMid-ContinentInternational

Airport.

AOPA PILOT' 62 •APRIL 201 I

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Wingless and painted in greenprimer, every Cessna 162 Sky­catcher is a world traveler by thetime it arrives at Yingling Avia­tion's loading dock at WichitaMid-Continent InternationalAirport in central Kansas.

The two-seat trainers-and Cessna's

first foray in the Light Sport Aircraft mar­ket-are built in China and made readyfor flight there. But because of restric­tions on civilian use of Chinese airspaceand other considerations, the airplanesaren't flown there. Instead, they are dis­assembled, crated two at a time in a40-foot container, and shipped to a U.S.port. Then they go by rail to Kansas City,Missouri, and are trucked to Yingling-adiversified U.S. aviation enterprise that'sbeen a Cessna partner for more than ahalf-century.

The Skycatcher program has beendogged by slow development andproduction delays since it was firstannounced in 2006. But Cessna says it'son track to deliver 150 Skycatchers thisyear and accelerate production evenmore in 2012. The company has takenorders for about 1,000 Skycatchers.

"We believe we've turned a corner,"said Doug Oliver, Cessna's director ofcommunications. "We're very satis­fied with the quality of Skycatcherproduction, and we're pleased by thequickening cadence of deliveries."

In a policy reminiscent of Henry Ford,who famously said that customers couldchoose any color Model- T they wanted"as long as it was black," all Skycatchersare delivered from China with exactlythe same stock features. Then there's amenu of trim options that customers canchoose from, but those are purchasedseparately through Cessna dealers.

"In order to keep the price where ithas to be, there has to be standardiza­tion," Oliver said.

Making them flyOnce a shipping container arrives at theYingling loading dock, two airframes(already assigned N numbers) roll outto the hangar floor.

Workers at Yingling attach the wingsand tail surfaces, install a propeller,and are ready to test fly the still-greenaircraft. Post-reassembly test flights typ­ically last about one hour, and then eachairplane flies 84 nm north to a Cessnafacility in Independence, Kansas, forpainting. Every Skycatcher gets a secondtest flight and a customer "acceptance

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A Skycatcher rollsout of a shippingcontainer and onto

Yingling's loadingdock at Wichita'sMid-Continent

International Airport.After a long series of

delays, the globalproduction systemthat Cessna has

created is operatingsmoothly, andSkycatcher deliveriesare accelerating.

Jason 8alman, aproduction test

pilot, prepares for afirst flight in a new

Skycatcher (left).Sheldon Stoskopf(below left), aYingling technician,installs a door. ToddDuncan and his father

Robert (of Duncan

Aviation, below) takedelivery of a newSkycatcher that willbe used to teach

Todd's teenagechildren to fly.

AUPA PILOT· 63 •APRIL 2011

flight" in which the buyer and a Yinglingtest pilot fly together. If all goes well, theprocess in Kansas takes about 38 manhours to complete.

"That number may seem low, butwe're consistently meeting it and in afew cases even beating it," said LynnNichols, president of Yingling. "The air­craft production environment is new tous. But we're constantly refining it andfinding new ways to gain efficiencies."

Yingling also installs customer anddealer options that include extras suchas a second G300 display screen (MFD),autopilot, wheel fairings, an engineprimer, and an airframe parachute. (Asecond G300 display is the most popularoption.) Yingling also operates a Sky­catcher in its flight training departmentthat it rents for $98 an hour.

"Wichita has been pretty hard hiteconomically in recent years, but the Sky-

catcher has kept our number of studentstarts surprisingly healthy," Nichols said."People like the fact that the airplane isnew, has the latest technology, offers fan­tastic visibility, and that it has a stick."

New model

The Skycatcher is an entirely new under­taking for Cessna in some ways-andit touches on some of today's mostcontroversial economic and politicalissues-globalization and outsourcingchief among them.

Cessna has traditionally kept thevast majority of its work in-house withmostly union labor. The company cur­rently has about 8,000 total employeesincluding 6,000 in Wichita, and there'sconcern that, ifthe Skycatcher programsucceeds, Cessna will follow by shippingskilled work on its many other aircraftmodels overseas.

However, Cessna officials say theyaren't contemplating any such moves,and the company is building Skycatch­ers in China because it's the best way tomeet its target retail price of $ 112,250for complete airplanes. Cessna has along and storied history of "teachingthe world to fly" since the 1940s, andthe Skycatcher is the company's effort

Wings and controlsurfaces are

protected duringthe long voyage toWichita inside sturdywooden crates. The

process is madefor standardization,

and custom paint,avionics, and airframemods must wait untilthe aircraft arrive inthe United States.Cessna's move to

overseas productionis designed to reduceSkycatcher costsand make modern

flight training moreaffordable for a largernumber of students.

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Because of 25 Years of AudioControl New Product Development.Innovations such as InteIliVox·, digital

recording, Split Mode and BluetoothOlnterfaceare just a few examples of how we set thestandard.

to build a trainer for the next generationof student pilots.

"Our goal from the beginning was toget more people flying by lowering thecost of flight training," said Cessna's Oli­ver. "Flight training is part of our DNA.It's part of our pedigree. We had to finda way to make it more affordable toincrease the number of pilots."

Company officials said they hadto look abroad, and China won thecompetition.

Cessna's most recent trainer, the152, went out of production in the early1980s. And new Cessna] 72s with inte-

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'\:- #t~~--~~~CAJ:rA./LUlLeJL C~AOPA'S 2011 SWEEPSTAKES,

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grated Garmin G 1000 avionics suitescarry retail prices of about $270,000.

The Skycatcher is meant to givenew students a way to learn to fly atless cost, and hook them on Cessnaproducts with Garmin avionics fromthe beginning. A new pilot today canstep up through the Cessna productline from Skycatcher to Citation Mus­tang-and every airplane in between(172, ] 82, 206, Corvalis, 208) is likely tocarry a similar avionics suite.

"We're making real progress at ful­filling Skycatcher orders," Oliver said.''And we expect to see our order book

grow again as the cadence of deliveriescontinues to accelerate and people getaccustomed to seeing these airplanes inthe field. All indications tell us it's goingto be a very popular airplane."

In the field

John Sterling, operations director atDowntown Aviation at Gen. DeWittSpain Airport in Memphis, Tennessee,said the Cessna] 62 Skycatcher is attract­ing new students who come specificallyto become sport pilots.

"They came to us because they heardabout the Skycatcher and they wanted topursue the sport license," Sterling said."It's definitely creating demand."

Downtown Aviation took delivery ofits Skycatcher, serial number 1], in Sep­tember 2010, and the airplane loggedabout 200 hours of dual instruction

in its first four months of operation.Downtown Aviation charges $112 anhour for Skycatcher rentals, com­pared to $87 an hour for a Cessna 152and $149 an hour for a 2005, G1000­equipped Cessna 172.

"We've had Cessna 150s and 152s

in our fleet for years and our costs onthem are extremely low because theairplanes are paid for," Sterling said."We've had some preliminary discus­sions about possibly selling the 150sand 152s and buying more Skycatch­ers. But we really want to get at leastone full year of operational experiencewith the Skycatcher under our beltsbefore we make a decision.1fwe could

get our costs on the Skycatcher downto the level of our 152s, we would havebought several Skycatchers."

So far, Sterling said the Skycatcherand its new Continental 0-200 enginehave held up well to the rigors of thetraining environment. Other than aweak plastic ring on the oil door fas­tener, the airplane has been completelytrouble-free, he said. And pilots seekingto learn to operate the complex avion­ics suites in integrated G1000 systemshave begun flying the Skycatcher andits far simpler G300 first.

"Several of our customers have madethe transition from G300 to our 172s and

182s with the G1000 system, and they doso without any difficulty," Sterling said."The operating logic behind the twosystems is so similar that it makes thetransition much easier, and there's less "frustration and less expense." Ia'A

E-mail the author at dave.hirschman@

aopa.org.

AOPA PILOT' 66 . APRIL 201 I