True Flight Aerospace chief executive Kevin Lancaster says the rebirth of the four-seat, single-engined Tiger general aviation aircraft will begin in earnest early in 2008 when his new production plant in Valdosta, Georgia, is up and running.
As of early November, one-fifth of the tooling and production equipment had been moved from the aircraft's most recent manufacturing plant in Martinsburg, West Virginia to Georgia.
The new 5,575m² (60,000ft²) facility will be sized to produce as many as 200 aircraft a year, although Lancaster says the break-even point is three or four a month. He says the first aircraft should roll off the line in summer 2008.
Lancaster in August paid less than $1 million in bankruptcy proceedings for the remnants of Tiger Aircraft, including the type certificates for the entire aircraft line, but not the manufacturing facilities.
Taiwanese investors who had operated the company in Martinsburg since 1999 had pulled funding for "political" reasons not related to the health of company, says Lancaster.
In total, there are more than 5,000 two-seat and four-seat versions of the aircraft that was originally built by Grumman American. Lancaster plans to support all of them.
Rather than "re-invent the wheel", the company is taking a fresh look at the manufacturing process and is planning to make "incremental" improvements to the aircraft itself, including offering a basic version without the Garmin G1000 panel, a standard feature on the $275,000 version offered by Tiger Aircraft.
"One of the things that hampered Tiger in Martinsburg was that its foreign ownership didn't understand the market in the USA and how to position the aircraft," says Lancaster. "They went straight to the high-end market. Somewhere in between, there's room for a new Tiger that doesn't have a G1000."
Lancaster says the company has not yet determined prices for the aircraft, and as such, has not begun selling production positions.
Regarding the production line, Lancaster has brought in former Grumman American employee Harry Eckert, one of the first employees to build the two-seat Grumman American AA-1 series aircraft in Ohio in the late 1960s, as an adviser on the start-up. Lancaster says Eckert designed and built much of the tooling for the AA-1.
Although he is in the process of finding investors for a venture that has been self-funded to this point, he is deliberately being nearsighted. "Our goal is to keep ownership not just in the USA but, as much as we can, local," says Lancaster.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
