RON DRAPER, TEXTRON AVIATION Almost 10 years ago, Textron Inc. purchased the assets of Beechcraft and set out to join the storied OEM with its rival across town in Wichita, Kansas, Cessna Aircraft Co., under the umbrella of Textron Aviation, along with Bell Helicopters, based in the Dallas area. Ron Draper, a 25-year Textron veteran, has spent most of his Textron career with Cessna but moved around in increasing leadership positions. In 2018, he returned from Bell to lead Textron Aviation as its president and CEO. Draper served as a helicopter pilot in the Army, and he now has his Cessna Citation CJ3 type rating along with time in the company’s fixed- wing piston singles. BusinessAIR asked Draper recently for his assessment of the business aviation market and Textron Aviation’s position in it.
QUESTION 1
BusinessAIR: Based on the recent demand surge and softening in the business aviation market, how is Textron Aviation adjusting its offerings to adapt to those changes? Has a new kind of customer emerged from the pandemic years? Ron Draper: The market for us…feels like a pretty strong market. Sales are very strong through the year; you can see that in our first-half results: [For the] first half of the year thus far, book to bill [ratio] has been greater than one, so we’re still booking more airplanes than we’re delivering. North America [shows]
no change [and] is our strongest market. Customer sentiment in our marketplace still is fairly strong…many in the marketplace— looking at surveys, consumer confidence—really feel like that the market is going to stay pretty resilient going forward. We’re pretty confident in the market. We’ll see how things unfold in the second half, but right now our sales are strong and we continue to move forward. Fractional still seems really strong, and they seem to be picking up on maybe some of those new customers that came into the industry, that maybe chartered for a while [who] then maybe move into fractionals. So, we’re watching the stickiness of all that.
QUESTION 2
BusinessAIR: How has Textron Aviation navigated the supply chain issues that have plagued OEMs across the industry? Is there interplay with the backlog on the turbine side? Ron Draper: [Looking] at deliveries thus far this year, jets are down a couple [of units] compared to last year, as we pushed
through some supply chain challenges, but jet deliveries are planned to increase for the second half—we’re working hard on that. Actually, turboprops and pistons are up through the first half of the year, compared to last year, turboprops up a small amount, and pistons up substantially, so ’23 deliveries are going well, and we’ve got a lot more planned in the second half of the year.
QUESTION 3
BusinessAIR: The Beechcraft Denali has been a much-anticipated addition to the single-engine turboprop market, and it looks sized to fit a sweet spot with capacity and performance—and efficiency. That efficiency comes in part from the clean-sheet GE Catalyst powerplant. How is the program going, following the delays introduced by certifying a clean-sheet airframe and engine at the same time? Ron Draper: I feel great about the Denali. It made its airplane debut at EAA [AirVenture]. We’ll also take it to NBAA [the National Business Aviation Association’s Business Aviation Conference and Expo] this year, and it’s exciting. If you’re paying attention in the skies over Wichita on any given day, we have three of them flying, engineering
aircraft that are flying every day. The airplane’s flying great… the performance of the engine is going great. We still have a lot of certification paperwork to get through at the FAA. We are finishing up the last couple of months through the end of the year all of our development flights. By the end of the year, we should lockdown engineering, and early next year go into FAA for-credit certifying. That will put us into [certification] in the second half of next year. The risk factors are shrinking as we do all that. I wish we had it now. It is audacious to do a brand-new engine and a brand-new airplane. It would have been simpler to go with an existing engine—we would have been able to go a little faster, but we’re going to get 15-plus percent better fuel efficiency out of this engine. That was the target, and in our own flight testing we’re beating that.
31
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator