April 28, 2020 A Texas Colt Breaks Free

The Liberty Gazette

April 28, 2020

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

The cover of the May issue of Flying Magazine sports a brand-new Colt. What’s so special about that? For one, it’s built in Texas. At the former military base in Hondo, Texas Aircraft Manufacturing has made its home. From their hangar, workers at Texas Aircraft are riveting, welding, wiring, and even applying composite material to the new Light Sport aircraft. They’ve set their target: the flight training market. It’s been a tough market to survive in since the 1980s, the beginning of decline of general aviation thanks to absolute greed driven by lawyers, fed by juries, and made possible by legislation (more lawyers). There’s nothing about those changes that has been good for aviation, and the flight training business has been especially hard hit. In fact, many small airplane manufacturers just quit making training airplanes.

The favorite has always been Cessna. The models 150, 152 and 172 have dominated the flight school market for decades. Still do. That means students are flying in airplanes designed in the 1950s. Not that there’s anything wrong with a Cessna 150. It’s a fun little airplane. But it’s old. And no one has really come up with a suitable competitor because it just costs too darn much to produce these days. If you bought a C150 in 1958, you paid between $7,000 and $8,500. In today’s money, that would be a range of about $63,000 to $77,000. You can’t actually buy a new C150 today, but you can buy a C172. The 172 came out just a few years before the 150 and the base price was around $9,000. If you want a new one today, you’d better be ready to fork out $411,000. Granted, the airplane is considerably more modern, with new safety features, improved aerodynamics, and an impressive digital panel which gives the pilot a great big “moving map” right in front.

Photo from https://texasaircraft.com/colt-aircraft/

But some guys in Hondo thought, what if we could do better? What if we could build a better training airplane and keep the cost down? Texas Aircraft CEO, Matheus Grande, and his design chief, Caio Jordao, set out to do that.

Photo from https://texasaircraft.com/colt-aircraft/

After three years in development, the company is now putting out the two-place trainer with beefed up landing gear (to survive those student hard landings), an all-aviation-grade aluminum airframe with solid metal rivets, and a welded-chromoly passenger safety cell for a base price of $167,000. It comes with a sweet avionics package, including synthetic vision and auto pilot. The GRS ballistic parachute for the airplane is optional.

The thing is, this is needed for a service industry that is struggling. Costs need to be kept down so that people can afford to learn to fly. The price point on the Colt will help flight schools offer competitive prices to their students.

The icing on this Texas cake is that many of the employees are former members of the U.S. military. The company recruits from nearby Randolph Air Force Base and Kelly Field. Let’s hear it for Texas!

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