Karen Walker/ATLANTA
Once upon a time there was a thriving general-aviation (GA) industry in North America - and you do not have to be especially well informed to know that this story may not end with everybody living happily ever after.
From the industry's hey day in the 1970s, when companies such as Beech, Cessna and Piper produced thousands of aircraft to the late 1980s, when sales all but dried up and manufacturers changed their product lines or went out of business, the decline of GA has been well documented and much lamented.
Brighter news may be around the corner, however. A NASA-led initiative aims to revitalise the GA industry by encouraging the development of new technologies, which will make small aircraft cheaper, safer and easier to fly. The Advanced General Aviation Transport Experiments (AGATE) programme brings together NASA, industry and the US Federal Aviation Administration in a jointly funded venture to kick-start the GA industry and make small aircraft more appealing to more people.
The AGATE programme was launched 18 months ago and is intended to run until 2001, by which time a demonstrator aircraft should be flying. More than 40 US companies have joined the programme, which has amassed funding of $186 million. AGATE participation requires that manufacturers match the funding provided by NASA, but, so far, most companies are over-matching by only up to 50%. It is the only NASA subsonic-research programme, which has not had its funds cut, reflecting the priority which the US Government puts on revitalising the GA sector.
Dr Bruce Holmes is NASA's AGATE programme manager. Based at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Holmes provides a focal point for the many separate activities, known as work packages, which exist under the AGATE umbrella. A keen private pilot, he has personal experience to support theories on where the GA industry went wrong, how it can be put back on track and where the target audience lies.
Holmes lists three main reasons for the decline of GA - cost, time and difficulty. Purchasing and operating an aircraft is too expensive for most personal budgets; it takes too long to gain piloting proficiency - typically 1,000h; while aircraft controls and the airspace system are perceived as complex.
"Everything we do in this programme will be driven by market research," says Holmes. "Surveys that we have conducted have pointed to pilots wanting a standard in their aircraft similar to that of today's cars. They want safety, affordability, reliability, utility and ease of use."
Holmes views anyone who needs to travel within what he terms the "doughnut" zone of 240-1,100km (150-700 miles) as a potential user of an AGATE aircraft. In 3h, a person should be able to travel up to 240km by car, more than 1,100km by commercial carrier, or up to 1,100km using an AGATE transportation system which utilises the 18,000 existing GA airfields across the USA.
The AGATE messages are: "If you need to travel less than 700 miles a trip, don't live next door to a major airport," and "...if you don't relish the idea of driving 14h to get to and from your destination, you may be an AGATE flier".
CUSTOMER BASE
Other market research has indicated that a customer base exists, if the vital issues of safety, affordability and ease of use are addressed. Half of the private pilots surveyed say that they use their aircraft as a means of transport - not as a recreational sport - 50% or more of the time, while 15% use them only as a means of transport. Almost half of these pilots say that they would pay $100,000 or more for "...the most advanced aircraft they could imagine" and 63% say that they expect to purchase an aircraft within the next five years, representing a market for 80,000 aircraft.
Holmes says: "Demand does not turn into a sale until it's met with the correct price and availability. Used aircraft will account for about 40,000 of those expected sales, but there is still a tremendous unmet demand."
The AGATE's basic guidelines call for a piston-single, single-pilot, light aircraft, which can be operated in all-weather conditions. Such an aircraft is defined as being equipped with a Category I landing system, giving the capability to land with a 200ft ceiling and 1km of visibility, but is not cleared for flight into thunderstorms, known icing conditions, or moderate-to-severe turbulence.
An AGATE aircraft's safety rates should be similar to those of cars and airliners. Point-to-point cost and time per trip should also be similar to those of cars and airliners for mid-range travel, and operational reliability needs to be similar to that of cars. Noise and emissions' levels for piston/propeller power plants should meet current and future environmental restrictions.
Working to basic guidelines, the AGATE programme has been divided into eight packages. The first five are NASA-led, and address the issues of integrated cockpit systems; propulsion sensors and controls; integrated design and manufacturing; icing-protection systems; and AGATE integration platforms.
Work on many of these packages is under way, with companies such as Cessna, Cirrus Design, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon Aircraft already signed up as principal members. On 10 April, an AGATE executive council was elected, which consists of representatives from Arnav Systems, Cessna (holding the vice-chair), Cirrus, Raytheon and Teledyne Continental. Raytheon, represented by its vice-president of engineering, Stephen Hanvey, holds the chair. Non-voting members of the executive council are the General Aviation Manufacturers' Association (GAMA) and the Small Aircraft Manufacturers' Association.
To date, the AGATE consortium has signed a joint sponsored research agreement - a relatively new concept within US industry - published a business-operation handbook, conducted the first phase of market research, and established a NASA/FAA GA design competition among 22 US universities.
Simultaneously, the FAA has established a GA and vertical-flight office to work with NASA. The FAA leads the remaining three work packages - those covering training and air and ground infrastructure.
Each of these three packages is at a very preliminary stage. The training package team aims to cut by at least half the cost and time it takes for a pilot to reach proficiency. The team will need to create an AGATE level-of-training standard to coincide with the first flight of an AGATE-concept aircraft, as well as look at transition training from standard to AGATE aircraft (and vice versa) and recurrent training.
As part of continuing market research being conducted by the AGATE members, NASA will unveil a simulator at this year's Experimental Aircraft Association fly-in at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in July. Suitably qualified people will be invited to spend up to 9min in the simulator, which will have rudimentary controls, an out-of-the-window visual display and two flat-panel liquid-crystal cockpit displays, but which will be non-interactive.
These early "guinea pigs" will then be interviewed on their responses to the cockpit layout and other aspects of the concept demonstrator. This will be the first chance for the public to see and feel some of the changes, which the AGATE programme may introduce into GA.
Each work-package team has specific goals and time-lines. The team working on propulsion sensors and controls, for instance, is not developing a new GA power plant but producing sensors and controls which will make available engines easier to use and more efficient.
Every team is working within AGATE guidelines, which call for a 20% reduction of pilot workload, an at-least-10% improvement in fuel economy, and an extension of time between overhauls of at least 10%. Maintenance costs and numbers of engine failures should also be reduced by at least 10%. In reality, the team members, which include Teledyne Continental and Textron Lycoming, regard these figures as extremely conservative and hope for larger margins of improvement.
The team working on icing-protection systems is addressing two major issues - how to help a GA pilot avoid getting into icing conditions, and how to help his aircraft survive icing if it cannot be avoided. The team's challenge will be to reduce the cost of icing-protection systems so that an AGATE pilot can let technology do the majority of work.
TEAM FOCUS
The focus for the team working on the integrated design and manufacturing package will be on developing and validating low-cost production methods which should reduce the cost of airframe and propeller components by between 25% and 40%. Huey Carden of NASA's Langley Research Center, and one of the leaders of this work package, says: "We need to get into the mass-production approach and away from hands-on manufacturing." The team will also cover quality-control methods, use of composite materials and advanced crashworthiness concepts.
For the many companies now involved in AGATE, this is a unique opportunity to pool funding, resources and know-how in a venture which should help each of them achieve the same goal - to sell more aircraft or aircraft components.
"Many of the things that AGATE is looking at, we were already interested in anyway," says Ed Hooper, group manager of advanced designs at Raytheon. "This joint-funding effort allows us to realise the completion of each project sooner."
Raytheon is represented on each of the work packages, in addition to holding the chairmanship of the executive council, and has two people tasked with coordinating AGATE work. The company has also provided two Starship airframes (prototypes used in the aircraft's certification process) to NASA for AGATE research. The aircraft are structural shells, without engines or avionics, which may be used in acoustic-transmission research and crashworthiness testing.
Raytheon believes that AGATE technology will be something, which can be grown upwards. "If it's affordable in a Bonanza, then it can go into a King Air," says Hooper. "AGATE's ability to escalate the time factor is important, given the state of health of the general-aviation industry. This collaborative effort has the potential to save the patient."
The AGATE programme is not a lone initiative in the effort to revive the GA industry. In 1994, an industry-led campaign succeeded in getting the US Government to sign the General Aviation Revitalisation Act, limiting the product-liability laws, which had crippled many manufacturers. Industry organisations have also been active in this area, including the National Business Aircraft Association (NBAA)/GAMA "No Plane, No Gain" advocacy campaign. AGATE's importance, however, lies in the way in which it is bringing together industry and government organisations to tackle technological problems. For the first time in many years, it looks as if the tale of the GA industry might have a happy ending after all.
Source: Flight International
