Where Have All the EAB Aircraft Gone?

[rwanttaja]

Vans is doing well in their market … much better than any of the certificated OEMs are doing in the small, GA market.

Ummm, well. Not really the case, unless you closely define "small GA market".

If you look at the FAA registry, it includes the model year for the aircraft. In my January 2019 database, there were 295 2017-model Cirruses, vs. 240 Vans aircraft of ALL models. 41 of them were RV-12 light sports. There were only 72 2017 Cessna 172s.

Annual "Production Rates" for individual RV models runs in the 3-5 dozens, not the hundreds (looking just at the US-registered examples). There are lots of RV models, of course, so that does build the numbers a bit more.

Here's a stab at extracting the number of new RVs added to the US registry over the past eight years. It is effected by the FAA re-registration process, but I've tried to compensate for that.

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
RV-6	18	10	-20	-17	-29	-1	16	11
RV-7 Rate	84	72	72	56	45	44	53	54
RV-8 Rate	49	43	36	49	23	36	44	39
RV-9 Rate	39	47	30	33	25	29	19	22
RV-10 Rate	37	39	24	19	33	34	31	21

As I said, the above table has compensation for the de-registration process. This table shows the net RV fleet size for individual models, with the net fleet size each year for Cirrus. The number for each table is extracted from that year's registration database; model year isn't used.

	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
Vans RV-3	211	210	205	196	174	172	175	176	169
Vans RV-4	1126	1128	1118	1118	1066	1063	1065	1072	1063
Vans RV-6	1999	2012	2006	2002	1962	1965	1964	1985	1972
Vans RV-7	901	977	1040	1122	1173	1229	1277	1325	1375
Vans RV-8	1036	1084	1123	1165	1204	1233	1272	1319	1342
Vans RV-9	464	501	543	577	603	635	667	687	706
Vans RV-10	238	273	310	331	353	389	423	453	473
Total RVs (ex. RV-12)	5975	6185	6345	6511	6535	6686	6843	7017	7100
Cirrus (All Models)	3698	3808	3917	4047	4148	4319	4536	4794	5258

I don't include the RV-12 in here because many are SLSA or ELSA. Later RV models aren't here, either, but there are yet low numbers for them.

In any case, there ARE more RVs in the US registry than Cirruses...but the RV series dates back to the 1970s, and the Cirrus just in the past 20 years or less.

Ron Wanttaja