With new deal, Lancair is flying high
Colombian Air Force will get 25 planes in company's largest deal ever
By Andrew Moore / The Bulletin
Published: February 04. 2009 4:00AM PST

A variant of the Lancair Legacy FG model seen here will be licensed for
production by a Colombian company for use in training pilots of the
Colombian Air Force.
Photo courtesy Lancair
Redmond kit plane manufacturer Lancair International Inc. announced a $6.5
million licensing deal Tuesday that will allow a Colombian company to build
25 Lancair aircraft for the Colombian Air Force for pilot training.
The deal with the Colombian Aviation Industry Corp. marks Lancair's largest
deal ever, according to Lancair General Manager Tim Ong.

"What's novel about the deal is most military training occurs in
certificated planes, but by purchasing kit planes and completing them in
Colombia, their Air Force will get a relatively high performance training
aircraft at a very reasonable cost," said Max Trescott, a Mountain View,
Calif.-based aviation industry consultant. "It looks like a very good deal
for everyone involved."

Kit planes, or planes built from kits, can be certified airworthy by the
Federal Aviation Administration if they are at least 51 percent built by the
plane's owner. Customers are responsible for getting the planes certified by
the FAA. This differs from manufacturers, whose planes are certified by the
FAA before they're sold.

Due to the growing demands for new technology, such as carbon composite
materials, the FAA has proposed more stringent manufacturing regulations for
kit planes.

The Lancair planes built in Colombia will not be subject to FAA regulation.

The deal helps Lancair's bottom line, Ong said, but he added that the
company has not been buffeted by the recession as much as other airplane
manufacturers. Ong said new orders are down, but a backlog of orders as well
as the newly announced deal means the company is likely to weather 2009 "in
good shape."

To prove the point, Ong said Lancair is hiring. Many airplane manufacturers,
including industry giants Cessna Aircraft Co. and Hawker Beechcraft Corp.,
both based in Wichita, Kan., have recently laid off thousands of employees.

The Colombian deal calls for Lancair to fabricate the planes' carbon
composite components either at its plant in Redmond or its fabrication
facility in the Philippines. All of the planes' components will then be
shipped to Colombia for final assembly.

Ong said the Colombian Air Force currently uses older, aluminum-frame Cessna
trainers that have suffered corrosion damage on account of the humidity
where the trainers are based. A switch to planes made from carbon composite
materials eliminates the threat of corrosion, Ong said.

Plans call for the completion of one aircraft per month in Colombia,
beginning Aug. 15, and increasing to two per month by the end of the year,
according to the company.

The model licensed to Colombia is a variant of the company's Legacy FG
model. The new aircraft, which exists on paper only, features a wing that's
15 percent bigger than the Legacy FG wing, leading-edge cuffs and a ventral
fin, all design attributes that provide stability in flight, Ong said.

"The whole point is they want to develop infrastructure, create jobs,
(provide) economic development and also bring in core engineering jobs; and,
second, they have to replace their fleet of trainers anyway so it was not
that much more expensive to do it this way," Ong said.

Lancair was founded in Southern California in 1984 by Lance Neibauer, a
graphic artist who helped pioneer the use of composite materials in aircraft
construction. The company moved to Redmond in 1991. It later spun off the
manufacturing of FAA-certified, factory-built planes into a separate
company - Columbia Aircraft Manufacturing Co. - which Cessna bought out of
bankruptcy in 2007.

According to the company, Lancair has delivered more than 2,000 kit
airplanes. It employs 54 people at its plant neighboring the Redmond Airport
and approximately 90 at its plant in the Philippines, Ong said.

Andrew Moore can be reached at 541-617-7820 or amoore@bendbulletin.com.

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