Piston Aircraft Shipments way down

The piston market has plunged 28% from 554 planes in Q1 2007 TO 399 planes in Q1 2008.

Among the startling:

  1. The SR22 shipments** dropped almost 75% from 217 to 55 over the previous quarter
  2. The 172 Skyhawk had an 87.5% drop over quarter 4 2007 (from 56 to 7)
  3. Piper’s Arrow, Saratoga TC, and 6x had NO shipments for the first quarter
  4. Every piston company saw a decrease in shipments
  5. Cessna*** and Cirrus had huge drops in shipments over the previous quarter (of course, most companies have bigger numbers in the 4th quarter so you could disagree with this).

**I know these are not sales (but are shipments) however shipments are usually a good indication of sales.
***Cessna was up over all over q1 2007 (increased jet sales), but down in the piston market.

Other: The business jet market was up 40.8% and the turboprop market was up 7.6% over 2007 q1.

source: GAMA (General Aviation Manufacturers Association)

Here is a spreadsheet I made copied and pasted.

airplane 2008 q1 2007 Q1 2007 Q4
SR22 55 114 217
DA40 50 55 57
172 SKY SP 34 47 66
TWINSTAR 33 42 45
182 T 21 35 19
SR20 18 16 42
DA20 18 29 27
182 16 21 56
BONANZA 15 19 85
206 T 14 26 43
400 13 15 19
BRAVO/ACCALIM 8 18 12
172 7 18 13
206 5 8 6
OVATION 2 5 12 4
WARRIOR 4 6 6
350 3 4 6
SRV 3 0 8
ARCHER 2 2 5
TOGA TC 0 3 2
6X 0 2 1
ARROW 0 1 5

This is really confusing to read.

looks like a job for Excel…
But yeah, those are some startling numbers

I did, except you can’t paste a spreadsheet into this.