Hey guys, I'm curious as to why you discontinued your composite ships???

From : Don Stackhouse

Running a composite shop involves a lot of overhead. If the order rate isn't high enough to keep a sufficient number of people sufficiently busy, the true hourly cost of running the shop quickly dwarfs the amount of revenue the sales generate. The sailplane business is far too fickle and meager to support a composite shop by itself. Also, there's so much misinformation and outright hype floating around out there these days that just having an outstanding product isn't a guarantee of getting sales. If it looks diferent (as any truly innovative product is likely to be), folks are afraid to buy it. Also, the rapid rate of evolution in competition sailplanes requires that the entire kit line needs to be redesigned, even reinvented, several times a year just to keep the products appearing "up to date" in the minds of the public. This eats so much of a small company's engineering resources that nothing is left to expand into new markets. The bottom line is that composite competition sailplanes are not a viable business by themselves.

We had several commercial projects in the works, but one of the aftereffects of the events of 9-11-01 was to put those on hold. With nothing left but the competition sailplane business to occupy our composite shop, we had the choice of closing the composites manufacturing portion of the business, or being forced out of business altogether.

If those other projects revive, or if we can generate enough steady business through other means to reopen our composites manufacturing, it's possible that we might someday make some more composite sailplanes, but only as a sideline, and only if we can afford to do it without expecting to make a profit from it.

Don Stackhouse
DJ Aerotech