– Steve Hitchen
Will the Cirrus SR22 be the king for eternity? Year after year it goes on its merry way as the supreme ruler of the shipments sheet, delivering in some years up to six times as many airframes as the combined efforts of all the other manufacturers of high-speed singles. One-by-one competitors have dropped away: the Bonanza is struggling to impact the market and Cessna gave up the TTx completely in 2017. It's hard to see any new model grabbing enough market to earn the name "Cirrus killer". But there is one that is turning heads more than the others: Diamond's DA50RG. This is a 300-hp diesel retractable with five seats and plenty of new technology. It's not a me-too model, but a very different machine that Diamond expects will compete hard for dollars that would once have gone straight to Cirrus. Diamond has stacked it with the sort of automation that seduces Cirrus customers, with the very powerful advantage of burning Jet-A1. But Cirrus still has one key feature in the SR series that the company attributes as a key selling point: the airframe parachute. Twenty-five years after it first appeared on a Cirrus, airframe parachutes have not proliferated to other GA models to any great extent. Is this the great differentiator that explains the rampant sales of the Cirrus? Australia's first two DA50RGs will cross our borders in February next year, in time for one of them to be displayed at Avalon. It may never prove to be a Cirrus killer, but there is still plenty of lustre in this big Diamond.
New runways at Brisbane and Sunshine Coast, and an impending third one for Melbourne were the catalysts for the senate RRAT inquiry into aircraft noise, but the metro GA airports didn't escape scrutiny. These are airports that were built away from densely-populated areas so residents wouldn't be impacted only for the urban sprawl to catch up to them. As the RAAA pointed out in their submission, you can't design airports, aircraft or flight paths to eliminate all noise; all you can do is not build them anywhere near housing, which governments originally did. Developers, real estate agents, governments and the home buyers themselves are the ones who created the urban sprawl, not the aviation community. Through Fly Neighbourly areas and local circuit procedures, aviation does make an effort to meet the desires of residents, yet residents continue to prefer the metro GA airports be forced to close. Even the senate committee recognises the disastrous economic and social impact that would have. Personally, I find the senate report and the measures outlined in the 2024 aviation white paper quite toothless. Neither of them have addressed steps needed to prevent the problem getting worse: housing needs to be banned within certain distances of airports. Governments are taking on the matter of aircraft noise with their right hands and simultaneously collecting all that lovely stamp duty from housing sales with their left hands. In Victoria, a legal precedent was set in 2019 when the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) said of Tyabb Airport: "This is a situation where the residential newcomers, since they have in fact been allowed to come, must defer to the needs of the airfield, rather than vice versa." It would be well within the rights of the GA community in that state to point to that ruling and thumb their noses at complainants. But they won't; they'll do what they can like they always do, even though the fault is not theirs.
RAAus has issued their new technical manual, which, among other things, now includes Group G aircraft, tagged as Lightweight Aircraft (LWA). However, the ASAO says they are still a couple of months off being able to take registrations for this group. After years of pressure from members for the MTOW increase and RAAus themselves turning the screws on CASA, it was a gutsy call back in March to delay the implementation even after CASA gave the approval. To say "we aren't ready" is to turn the microscope on themselves, not a characteristic a lot of administrators and regulators would subscribe to. It was, perhaps, the right decision; if they think they are not ready then they probably weren't. It's better to delay and get it right than for the recreational community to go through another registration debacle. The impacts of Group G are still not well understood, and won't be until the FAA's new MOSAIC regulations are written, which will permit Australian manufacturers to factory-build new designs to go straight into Group G. And you can bring that on any time you're ready.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch