There have been many rumors circulating about Piper Aircraft Corporation: All the machinery has been sold; the company is about to be sold to a group in any number of countries (sometimes, it sounds like the entire membership of the United Nations is maneuvering to buy Piper); or the company's assets will be liquidated soon. There is no shortage of speculation.
The fact of the matter is that Piper is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but the group that controls and is running the company will soon submit a plan to reorganize and emerge from the bankruptcy. Some machinery has been sold, but it was redundant equipment that resulted from combining all the Piper operations in Vero Beach, Florida. The secured creditor has about been taken care of. The company is building airplanes. On the latter, the court's original approval was to complete 65 airplanes that were in work when the bankruptcy filing was made. Since then, a plan has been approved that allows Piper to manufacture airplanes from scratch. When I was there in July, a brand-new Seneca was being prepared for a ferry flight across the Pacific to its new owner, an airline training school. Seven are being built for this purpose. I walked through every part of the plant, and while it is quiet, it is not dormant.
The fact that Piper is manufacturing new airplanes is pretty good evidence that it has in place the skill and equipment to do the job, to build any airplane in its complete line.
Currently, there are 260 employees at Piper, just a shadow of the work force that once manned the plant. The current plans call for 100 airplanes to roll out the doors in 1992 and for 300 to be built in 1993. The models will be pretty well across the board, though there are no Arrows in the schedule. The Malibu Mirage is slated to be on a one-a-month schedule by the end of this year and two a month by the end of next year.
Except for the Mirage, most of the airplanes are being built for training organizations, and so far this year, 80 percent of the airplanes have been exported. The important thing is that anyone wishing to buy a new Piper can now do so. The airplanes are, however, only built on order — no airplanes on speculation for now.
The prime mover behind all this is Stone Douglass, who owns the company that owns the company that owns the stock in Piper Aircraft. With no airplane background, Douglass comes to the party with an entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to build a profitable small company that would build 500 airplanes a year maximum. The reorganization plan that he will file would propel the company in this direction if approved. He has every intention of keeping Piper in the United States, in Vero Beach.
One thing that is gone is the previous owner's pricing policy. For the company to be truly profitable, prices had to be adjusted to reflect the realities of small-volume production of a wide variety of airplanes. A 1993 Warrior with IFR equipment will run from $145,000 to $155,000. A 1993 Malibu Mirage will be in the $610,000 to $645,000 range.
The big "if" is product liability. The bankruptcy judge has it in his power to sever the liability tail and allow the new company to be responsible only for the airplanes that it builds and not for airplanes built by the Piper Aircraft corporations of the past. Will this happen? If logic prevails, it will happen. If the product liability tail is removed, the company will go forward, build airplanes, employ people, and pay taxes. If the tail is not removed, the company will probably revert to Chapter 7 bankruptcy and be liquidated. It will employ nobody, pay no taxes, and build no airplanes. Either way, anyone damaged by an "old" Piper has nobody to sue. (That must really tug at the heartstrings of a lawyer.) So there is everything to gain and nothing to lose if the judge gets rid of the liability.
Currently, the cash flow is positive at Piper, the company is moving forward, and the spare parts problems are getting better. Other interested parties, the creditors for example, can file a reorganization plan of their own for consideration by the judge, but whatever, we will know within months whether or not Piper will be allowed to fly.
Loss
When the around-the-world air race passed through Frederick, Maryland, in midsummer, I was drawn to the beautiful Glasair III that was being raced by Heinz Bitterman and Mathias Stinnes. We had a mutual friend, Arthur Bond, who built the airplane for them. Heinz filled me in on details about the excellence of Arthur's business of building and completing Glasairs. He is proud of that airplane, proud of how it was built, how it looks, and how it performs.
Arthur went to Auburn University with my son, and I knew him as a fun- loving and genuinely nice person. I knew he had a company that was involved with Glasairs, but I had no idea of the extent of the involvement. I just didn't know of his great talent at building things, to say nothing of his ability to negotiate the FAA thicket on who is allowed to do what on kit airplanes. He built a number of the airplanes, completed others, and helped many homebuilders with their projects.
Admiring the Glasair that was being raced, a true long-range turbocharged beauty, I resolved to go visit Arthur's shop and write something about the activity. If Piper might be revived by an entrepreneur, the same spirit in the kit business could provide another leg of the stool that gets general aviation off of the floor.
I never made it to Arthur's shop. Instead, on the green in front of the terminal at the Auburn Airport, a couple of hundred of his family and friends said farewell to him on July 18. At 26 years of age, Arthur was killed test-flying a Glasair III.
Makes it work
Flying down to Auburn that sad day, the thunderstorms were plentiful from just north of Atlanta on down. When you mix thunderstorms and a busy terminal area like Atlanta, the proceedings can become quite interesting.
The Atlanta TCA tops out at 12,500 feet and tolerates no through IFR flights. That means you either go over the top, high, or you go around. It's a long way around, and when thunderstorms are on the prowl, they have to be considered in relation to the nose of the airplane as well as to the Atlanta TCA.
It was pretty simple going to Auburn. There was a big storm right over Atlanta. The controllers were busy accommodating airline aircraft that wanted to offset all the arrival routes by 5 miles. It seemed best to not be part of that problem, so we went around the area at 16,000 feet and found a gap between storms and flew on into Auburn.
Leaving, I remembered from the past that ATC wants an overflight at 13,000 or 15,000 feet when about 40 miles from Atlanta. There was only one heading that I'd fly because of weather, and when it was obvious to the controller that we would not make the altitude before using up the distance, he started giving vectors. Trouble was, the Stormscope was atwitter in the direction of the vectors, and the radar looked like a Christmas decoration — to say nothing of what the sky looked like to the naked eye.
I made a suggestion: "How about if I just circle here until you tell me I am high enough to fly a heading of 015?" That solved our thunderstorm/TCA problems, and we were soon clear of both.
After listening to the work they were doing, I remarked to my flying companion that we often don't properly appreciate the work done by controllers. Certainly on a stormy day around Atlanta, they work many times harder than they do on a sparkling clear day. For example, when they were doing the business about offsetting the arrival routes by 5 miles to clear thunderstorms, the controllers had to be ready for the first pilot who announced that 5 miles wasn't enough. It happened just as I was leaving a frequency, and I don't know what the solution was.
They also have to deal with pilots who might not be quite straight with them. One pilot kept inquiring about whether or not his time to expect further clearance would hold up. You could almost hear him tapping on the fuel gauges as he asked. How is a controller to know, when thunderstorms are the problem? The storms move, and some pilots might refuse to fly through something that other pilots have been handling. There are simply an enormous amount of variables when you mix a lot of traffic with a lot of thunderstorms, and an air traffic controller can't be expected to pin down any times.
They make it work, though, and that's what counts. Good folks. Thanks.
Related Articles
