It's Official... Lancair guru Lance Neibauer has given ANN an exclusive interview, and has told us in no uncertain terms, "the investment capital is all in, the deal is done."

"We finally put a deal together and as it turns out, it was our Malaysian partners that (finally) came in."

While reports last October indicated that several offers were on the table and that the preferred offer (then) was from a US concern, the other offers apparently convinced the Malaysians, who already had a significant stake in Lancair, to go the distance.

Good Things Come To Those Who Wait...

The intervening months have been tough, but the deal they made is a good one, and reportedly exceeds all others that were previously under consideration.

"The whole thing (the delay) was a blessing in disguise… we have a better deal now than Wall Street was presenting… so we're in real good shape right now."

More important, the amount seems sufficient to assure both the current program as well as some anticipated future developments. "In theory, we shouldn't have to go back to the money well at all. The balance sheet looks really good now, we have virtually no debt…  it feels good."

Lance wouldn't say exactly how much the deal was worth, but confirmed that the Wall Street deal originally involved a bit more than 25 million and that what they wound up was "significantly more."

Asking Lance if the future of the Lancair Certified program was truly assured, he replied, "Definitely, yeah. We started hiring people back last week…we have 60 or 70 back in right now, and (they are) primarily planning and getting ready for resumed production work. We've been cutting a bunch of purchase orders to get material flowing in. Its probably gonna take about two months to get our vendors all in line and get the product flowing in. A lot of these items are long lead time items. Some (require) as much as 90 days but those are the issues we have to wrestle with to get product out the door. We do have some nearly-complete planes that are sitting on the line (22 at last count) that are nearly ready, so we do expect to get some out the door by, say, February. Maybe."

Lance notes that the production ramp-up will happen, in earnest, right after the holidays with the composite shop, in particular, going online right around the first week of January.

Columbia 350 Coming Soon, C-400 A Little Later

On other subjects, Neibauer claims that the Lancair Columbia 350 certification is close and is "down to a few summary reports we have to write… and the 400 certification should be done some time in the first half of 2003. Everything's looking good right now."

While Lance won't quote initial production numbers until he is better acquainted with the supplier situation, he expects that a year from now, they "should be getting close to one a day. Though, our goal is to get to one a day as quickly as we can. We've been really diligent in keeping our quality levels up and we're not going to back off of that. So, it will have to be a slow and steady improvement in production rate, in order to keep up the quality we've demonstrated so far. We're just not going to sacrifice quality to get the numbers up. As a matter of fact, we have an opportunity to clean up some areas (in production) that we want to do better on and I think we're going to take them."

Lance notes an immense sense of relief to no longer... "be hunting for money… this 'Will Fly For Food' thing was no fun," and that he can now get back to R&D and the development of future products.

"Its what I do best."

Neibauer spoke of the future a little, noting that there was a lot of room in the Columbia four seat line for future development, and that "there's things beyond that." With a backlog of over 200 airplanes, and "LOTS" of money in the bank, its obvious that Neibauer is straining to get back into the design groove.

While Lance won't exactly state what his next project is, after the Columbia line settles down, he does say this… "I'm gonna do everything…
Am I going to do a jet? Yeah, I'm going to do a Jet.
Am I going to do a turboprop? Sure, I'm going to do a turbo-prop.
Am I going to do a retractable? Of course!
Am I going to do a helicopter? Yes!
Am I going to do an amphibian? Well; maybe… maybe not (laughing)."

FMI: www.lancair.com/certified