Talk:Cirrus VK-30

I read that 40 kits where sold, 13 of them made it flying. Any other info availble? 1 fatal crash I read about. Any more info availble? RGDS Alexmcfire

NTSB Reports

NTSB lists 3 VK-30 accidents since 1970. Two were fatal. In the first one the flap bracket separated and the 75 year old pilot was killed. The failure was attributed to poor welding on the flap push rods.

In the second, the airplane crashed into a mountain during approach. It had a fuel system that was modified outside of design specs. Witnesses reported no engine noise. Pilot and passnger were killed.

In the third, the engine quit in flight, and the pilot did a gear up emergency landing. Both pilot and passenger walked away, reporting no injuries. The pilot stated that the flowmeter had failed a couple of days previously, and he had been "estimating" remaining fuel - apparently not well.

In the one cited in the article, if they were testing a turbine powered aircraft, then it wasn't, by definition, a VK-30, which is powered by a reciprocal engin. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gpinkham1 (talk • contribs) 23:11, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

These are amateur-builts so all will deviate from the plans to some degree or another. However in this case the NTSB identifies it as a VK-30. - Ahunt (talk) 23:21, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Ahunt, concur with your finding. This VK30 incident (http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20001208X05368&key=1 the NTSB]did not come up when I did a data base search on VK 30. TNX —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.223.116.201 (talk) 21:00, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

"Best selling" 14 years promo

While the following may be correct, sounds lot like an advertisement, and one that needs constant monitoring. I added {timeframe} tag, but am more judgmental.

Thus the lessons of the VK-30 were directly responsible for the design of the Cirrus SR20 and SR22, which have been the best-selling general aviation airplanes in the world for the last fourteen consecutive years.[3][4][5][timeframe?]

This needs to be more like, 'Of XXX small planes sold from 2001 to 2015, YY% were this make'. I suspect that will be ego deflating, as there are dozens (thousands?) of different small plane models, and "top-selling" is likely only a single-digit percentage of the total market. At this point am disinclined to take on that research.

Got to this page by following link that mentions fatal 1996 crash of astronaut Robert F. Overmyer. GeeBee60 (talk) 17:20, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

I already fixed it, see what you think. - Ahunt (talk) 17:23, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

Ahunt, thank you for your efforts but this does still trouble me as there is still no end date in the claim nor information that specifically defines "best-selling". How many planes did the company sell in a defined period of time with beginning and end years. Say "from 2002 until 2016 they sold XXX planes out of a total of YYY comparable planes sold total by all manufacturers". Or say, "The [number of] planes they sold are YY% of the total market."

The first point - start and end dates - is that some point this company will not be the leader in sales -- may be this year may be 40 years from now, but open ended just does not work in an encyclopedia. It is fine for a news release / magazine article etc. to not say because there is a date included in the release. Here you have to name the source and the date of the information. I can help you phrase that if you identify the article that is your source.

The second point is that you need to have numbers that backs up the "best-selling" claim. If 50 manufacturers sell 9 planes each and this company sells 12 planes, well they are the best selling manufacturer but so what -- it means almost nothing. Now if they sell 50 planes for every 10 sold by any other company, that is significant. But it is much better if you specify how many are sold by this company and how many total comparable planes are sold, (and there are different ways to compare) and let the reader draw conclusions. It is best to avoid ambiguous lingo that doesn't tell much. Does that make sense?

Thanks for your effort. GeeBee60 (talk) 17:18, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

The refs already cited for that para outline the numbers to a sufficient extent to support the claims. Exact industry numbers can be found, year by year, in the GAMA reports. Best-selling means what it means in any marketing field, that the design sells more units than any other competing design, not that it has a majority of the market share. I don't think that we need all that detail, though. This is just a general statement in the lead section to show the notability of the VK-30 and its influence and the later SR-20 and 22. It would be very unusual to add exact market figures for the 20 and 22 here as the article is not about them, but the VK-30. In other words that level of detail, beyond a general statement, would be off-topic, especially in the lead section. As far as the dates go, the GAMA reports show that no other aircraft is in a position to overtake SR-20/22 sales at this point in time. We could say that it was the best-selling aircraft 2002-2017, but then it would require updating each year. All that is trying to be shown here is that this obscure design was influential in bringing about a very successful series, that is all and the refs already cited bear that out.- Ahunt (talk) 18:13, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

"Best Selling" is sales hype that should be replaced with real information. Have a good day. GeeBee60 (talk) 18:32, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

"the best-selling general aviation airplanes in the world every year since 2002." is a citable, verifable fact. Or should the fact the Ford F-150 was the best-selling vehicle in the world be deleted as non-notable sales puffery too? - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 00:42, 6 January 2018 (UTC)