Latest / VREF | The Truth About the Aviation Market / The Great Mooney Mystery: Six Questions The Record Doesn't Answer | EP 54
Transcript
- Addison: So I was on a website last week. It's an ordinary commercial website. It's clean, it's corporate, nothing flashy, although it does look like it's from like 1997. And I clicked the tab that said divisions, manufacturing, aircraft, MRO, propellers, specialty tooling, spares. And at the top of the page in the company's own masthead, it says Luscomb Mooney Aircraft Company. Loscom, Mooney, one company, one masthead. So I did what you'd do. I went looking for the press release. Guess what? There isn't one. There's no announcement, no trade coverage, no letter to the owner community. One of the most recognizable names in general aviation, a name with 11,000 aircraft flying behind it, is now, according to a webpage, half of a combined company nobody even announced. And the other half of the name belongs to a manufacturer that was liquidated at auction 18 months ago. Now, let me tell you what this episode is and just as importantly what it is not. I am not alleging anything. Nobody in this story has been accused of anything by anyone, including me. What I'm going to do for the next half hour is reconstruct a timeline from public records, an auction listing, a trade press announcement, county court filings, and a company's old website. And show you where the record is solid, where it's thin, and where it simply stops. When I say the record shows, I mean I can point to the document. When I say we could not confirm, I mean exactly that. This is the truth about the aviation market. Today, the Mooney Mystery. Welcome to the show. I'm Jason Zilberbrand. I'm president of VREF. We are the valuation guide for the banks, the insurance companies, the courts, the appraisal profession. Everybody has relied on us for decades. I've spent my career putting numbers on aircraft people love too much to price honestly. I'm a senior accredited appraiser. I've testified as an expert witness in disputes with eight-figure airplanes and the lawyers attached to them on the line. And if you've ever seen an appraiser on television explaining why somebody's pride and joy isn't worth what they think it is, there's a decent chance that was me. They call me the celebrity praiser. I answer to it reluctantly. The number is the job. And today's episode is what happens to numbers when information goes dark. Because every valuation I've ever signed rests on an assumption so basic nobody says it out loud that the material facts about an asset are knowable. Who owns the type certificate? Who makes the parts? Whether the factory is answering the phone today and will answer it next year. For roughly eleven thousand Mooney owners, Every one of those facts just got interesting at the same time, and not one of them arrived through an announcement. So bring a pencil because this one has dates. So first, 90 seconds on why the name is worth it and this episode is worth it, because I promised you this wouldn't become a history lesson. So Milney Mooney built somewhere north of 11,000 airframes in Kerryville, Texas. And for most of the piston era, the M20 line was the fastest production piston single you could buy at the time. The airplane engineers bought the airplane that made a religion out of efficiency. Production has started and stopped more times than anyone in Carryville wants to count. And the last new airframes rolled out in 2019, pre-COVID. The company that owned it through the 2010s and 2010s was Went quiet along with the line. But here's the thing everybody outside this industry gets wrong about a dormant OEM. And it's the key that unlocks this whole episode. The factory is not the asset. The fleet is the asset. 11,000 airframes didn't stop existing when the production halted. They're out there right now, they're flying, they're breaking, they're corroding, they're needing parts, and every single one of them is a captive customer of whoever controls the type certificates. With the tooling, with the drawings, and the parts pipeline. A dormant OEM with a live fleet isn't a startup opportunity. It's an annuity. The airplanes already exist. The demand for parts is involuntary. And the only question is who owns the paper that lets you legally satisfy it. Let me make the annuity concrete because captive parts demand sounds abstract. Until you run the math. Take a fleet of 11,000 airframes. Let's assume conservatively that only half are active, and that an active airframe consumes a few thousand dollars of type specific parts in an average year between scheduled maintenance events, squawks, discrepancies, and the occasional prop striker gear up that keeps this fleet's insurers honest. You're describing a parts market worth somewhere in the low tens of millions of dollars a year. Every year. And that's forever. No marketing required. No sales cycle, no competition permitted by federal regulation on those parts and whether or not they're certified. Now add a 30% price increase to that base. The increase is alone is worth millions of dollars annually, and the customers can't leave. Show me another business where the demand is mandated by the FAA and the customer's alternative is grounding a six-figure asset. That's what a dormant OEM with a live fleet actually means on a spreadsheet. That's why names like this don't change hands quietly, or at least they never used to. The brand equity, the intellectual property, the certification assets, the tooling in Piston GA, Mooney is about as blue chip as a dormant nameplate gets. Which is what makes the way this appears to have happened so remarkable. So let's talk about this. Now the part of the story is That deserves to be played completely straight because the facts are strong enough that they don't need any help. So let's roll the clock. January 26th, 2026. Laser, Lake Arrow Styling and Repair, a name every Mooney owner knows. The longtime Mooney Parts and Modhouse announces it is funding a rebuild of Mooney's parts operation. The announcement, as reported in the trade press, is Describes three entities working together. You have Mooney, you have Laser, and then you have Laser Aviation, a three million dollar first year parts program, and a 30% price increase on Mooney built parts taken up front, disclosed plainly. And then the line that matters, and I want to give it to you as the record gives it because precision is the whole game today. Laser said it had not bought a brand. The characterization was stewardship. Guys, a steward is not an owner. explicitly on the record not a change in ownership. That was January. And I want you to hold that sentence in your hand. Because seven months later, there was a limited liability company whose name contains both Luscombe and Mooney. The record shows it operating from 165 L Mooney Road. That's the Mooney factory address in Kerryville, folks. The phone number on the website is Mooney's phone number. And Mooney dot com, the domain that the owner community has typed for thirty some odd years. now serves that combined company's website, division tabs and all. And I'm not gonna editorialize here. I'm gonna do what an appraiser does with two documents that don't reconcile. them next to each other, face up, and read them to you one more time. January, not a purchase, not an ownership change, a steward. August, a company bearing both names at Mooney's address, with Mooney's phone number behind Mooney's domain. And I want to pause on why the January language matters so much. Because this is the kind of distinction that decides lawsuits and appraisals alike. Steward, not owner, Is not a throwaway line, guys. It's a representation made in public to a community of 11,000 owners who make purchase decisions, maintenance decisions, and so versus keep decisions partly on the basis of who stands behind the fleet. When a parts program and a price increase are announced under the banner of stewardship, the owner community prices that as continuity. But if the structure was something else or became something else, The owners priced the whole thing wrong. Words about ownership move markets in this industry exactly because there's no disclosure regimen, forcing anyone to say them precisely. Both of those things can be true. There are corporate structures, there are licenses, there's operating agreements, there's staged options and affiliated entities under which every word of the January statement remains accurate, while everything I just described also exists. I can draw you three org charts on a napkin that reconcile them. But I can only draw them as hypotheticals because, well, nothing's been filed. Nothing's been announced. Nothing's been explained in public that tells us which one is real. We could not confirm the relationship between the January entities and the LLC that's on the masthead. That's not an accusation, that's just a gap. And the rest of this episode is about the shape of that gap. Let's take a quick pause because you know the drill. And today the pitch is unusually on topic. Follow the show, like this episode, please subscribe to us on YouTube or whatever app you're in, and please leave us a rating. And here's the reason why, and the honest reason: because this show runs on public records and zero sponsorship from anybody it covers. We get no money, no OEM money, no parts house, no brokerage money. And episodes like this one are exactly why that matters, because nobody paying my bills would want this episode to exist. The algorithm is my only marketing department. And guys, you know this. You are the algorithm. So 10 seconds of thumbs, liking this episode, keeps independent coverage of this industry in your feed. So please take two seconds, do it now while I turn to the strangest part of this whole story. And I want to thank you in advance because it actually does mean something to me. So, because here's the question I couldn't shake, why does the other name on the door belong to a company that was liquidated? Luscomb, another legend, the pre-war all metal monoplane, the eight series, a name aviation people speak with real affection. The modern chapter, as the record shows, a venture launched in June 2019 under Test Strake. and young to put Luscomb back into production in Western New York. And the way that chapter ended? Well, it was on December 19th, 2024, in a Starman Brothers auction. The entire Luscomb Aircraft Corporation factory, the whole enchilada, as a single lot, type certificate A-694. It included the STCs, it included all of the jigs, the fixtures, the tooling, the parts inventory, Everything that legally constitutes the ability to be Luscom gaveled at one light item and it happened five days before Christmas. And the aftermath from the county court record, well, July 2025, the Chautauqua County Industrial Development Agency and the Local Development Corporation sued to recoup roughly five hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars combined. Public economic development money. That went into this venture. That filing is public. Anyone can read it. It is, for the avoidance of doubt, a claim against the old venture, not against whoever bought the assets at auction. Those are different parties. And keeping them separate is exactly the kind of precision this episode owes everyone in it. So now assemble the picture. We have a liquidated New York Light Sport Manufacturer sold whole at auction as a lot. It surfaces eight months later, sharing a masthead with a dormant Texas high performance OEM at the Texas OEM's address behind the Texas OEM's domain. And here's the read. Because this is the part I'd actually defended a conference podium. That is not sentiment. Nobody combines these two nameplants out of nostalgia. The fleets don't overlap, the buyers certainly don't overlap. The airplanes could not be any more different. But look at it as an asset strategy and it snaps into focus instantly. Two type certificates. Two tooling libraries. Two brand names with real recognition. Two captive parts markets. One acquired at auction, one by its own January description steward. Whoever assembled this wasn't collecting airplanes, they were collecting certificates, tooling, and installed fleets. Which brings us to the business case, and that's a segment I might be the only person in aviation media equipped to do properly. So let's think like the buyer, because the buyer here, whoever it is, is thinking clearly. The pitch is not we're building Moonies again. Nobody has made money building new Moonies in 40 years. And every group that has tried has the scar tissue to prove it. And before anybody emails me that new production is back on the menu, I know a few months ago I actually published it. Factory price list that crossed my desk, and we talked about it on the show at one time. And if you recall, if you're sitting down, it's $1.7 million for a new aircraft, and that's before options. And I'm gonna let that number make my argument for me. Because at 1.7 million dollars before optional equipment in a market where that money buys you into a late model turbine aircraft. New production isn't a volume business, it's literally just a brochure. It's a halo at the top of the catalog that exists to tell you what the real business is. New production is the romance. It is never the business. The business and the website's own division tabs lays it out like a slide deck. Is an integrated industrial platform and it has four legs. Leg one, aftermarket parts. And this is the annuity I described in segment one. Captive demand, 11,000 airframes that cannot legally buy from anyone else for type certificate parts, price realistic and inelastic demand. When your airplane is down for a part, you don't comparison shop, guys. You know this. You pay whatever it takes. AOG Urgency does the negotiating for the seller, and the record shows a 30% price increase on Mooney Bill parts already taken. And that was announced in January in public. Whoever runs this understands exactly what they own. Leg two, it's an MRO. It has recurring revenue, high margin, and laser brings the one thing you can't buy at an auction, a reputation. The owner community already really does trust. The maintenance relationship is also to the distribution channel for leg one. So parts and MRO aren't two businesses. They're one flywheel. And here's leg three. And pay attention to this one. It's prime subcontracting. The website claims commercial, military, space, and maritime customers. If that's real, that's the actual revenue line. A certificated aircraft factory in Texas with machine shops, tooling capability. And a quality system is worth more as a subcontractor to primes than it ever was building four airplanes a month. We could not confirm any of those customer relationships. The site asserts them. Nothing in public record corroborates them yet. And I want to be precise about that, but as a thesis, it's the best part of this deck. Okay, leg four, type certificates as inventory. This is the part in the general public that they never see. A type certificate is an asset. You can hold it, license it, you can even mortgage it if you didn't know that. You can sell it. Dormant TCs are cheap because the market prices the story, dead brand, sad ending instead of the paper. Acquiring dormant certificates at distressed prices, it's not nostalgia. It's a strategy with a long, quiet history in the industry. And the December auction, the entire legal identity of Luscomb is one lot, is what that strategy kind of looks like in the wild. Now the part that's my actual lane and the reason this episode belongs in the show. What does all this do to the value of these aircraft? Here is the single most important sentence in this episode for anybody who owns an M20. Parts availability is the biggest driver of value in an out-of-production fleet. It's not speed. It certainly isn't rampant presence, and it has nothing to do with how much you love it. It's whether it can be fixed legally and quickly at a price that doesn't total it. Every appraisal of every out-of-production airplane is underneath the arithmetic a bet on the parts pipeline. So this development cuts one of two ways. And I'm going to tell you honestly that I don't know yet which one it is. So here's the first: it's the supportive case. If this consolidation genuinely stabilizes the parts supply with a funded program and real inventory, a factory address that answers the phone with real customer service. That is really good for Mooney, and it's really good for Mooney residual values. A 30% parts premium on an airplane you can actually keep flying, beats a discount on one you can't. Fleets with credible parts pipelines hold value. Fleets without them bleed out slowly and then get parted out. Now let's play devil's advocate. If prices rise 30% and availability doesn't improve, and if the increase lands but the inventory doesn't show up, Then ownership costs went up with no offsetting certainty, and that flows straight into the residual values with a negative sign. A parts monopoly that raises prices without delivering supplies how an installed fleet starts eating itself. Marginal airframes become parts donors. The donor supply suppresses whole aircraft values, and then the spiral feeds, like dominoes. And if you want to know what the negative case looks like in practice, well. I can describe it from the appraisal desk because I have valued fleets on both sides of this line. And let me be honest with you, it starts quietly. A wing scan or a landing gear casting goes to a 20 week lead time. An owner with a midtime airframe and a big squawk does the math. Repair cost plus the downtime against a really soft resale number and sells the airplane to a salvage buyer instead. That airframe becomes parts for about a year and This actually looks fine in the data. Parts availability improves because the donor supply is feeding the market, but every donor was subtracted from the fleet, so the fleet's floor price is now being set by salvage math instead of flying airplane math. The next marginal owner's decision got easier in the wrong direction. And I've watched type communities go through this cycle. And the cruel part is that the data looks healthiest right before it looks terminal. That's why the 30% increase standing alone tells you nothing. It's the increase paired with delivered availability or not that decides what movie this is. I don't know which case it is yet. Nobody outside that building does. It's been seven months. But I can tell you exactly what data I'm watching because saying watch this space without saying what to watch, well, that's entertainment. It's not analysis. So let me tell you the four dials. Parts lead times is reported by the type clubs and the Amaro network. That's the ground truth, no press release can fake. M20 days on market against trailing baseline. The ask to close spread on M20 transactions and our database. And transaction volume in the fleet against the same calendar window last year. Long time listeners to this show will recognize three of these four because it's the same test I gave you two episodes ago. Pointed at one fleet. If availability stabilizes, You'll see it in the lead times first and DOM second. If it doesn't, you'll see volume thin and the spread widen before anyone says a word out loud. The data will answer before the press release does. It always does. Which is our segue, and today is not even a segue, it's the same sentence. If you own a Mooney or any out of production airplane, and there are tens of thousands of you. Your airplane's value is moving on information that nobody's going to mail you. A VREF online membership gets you current values, historical values back to delivery. We give you operating costs. We give you the entire market stack so you can see what's for sale. We give you fleet data on virtually everything flying, including every Mooney variant. And it's the same platform that your bank, your insurance company are using. And they're pulling your values before they even touch the deal. And let's be honest, if there's real money on the table, buying, selling, refinancing, or if you're settling an estate with probate, get an accredited appraisal from someone whose number gets tested in courtrooms and loan files, not some hanger conversation. Do me a favor, go check your value out. Go to VREF.com, VREF it. The owners who track their number don't get surprised by web pages. Okay, I want to get back to the story because now I owe you the list of what we still don't know. And this is the segment that earns the rest of the episode because an honest reconstruction has to end with its own gaps, numbered and in the open. And there are six of them. One, who won the December 2024 auction at what price? The listing is public. The result, as far as we could confirm, is not. That single fact connects or fails to connect the Luscomb half of the story to everything else. So if you know, please shoot me an email. Two, the information and what we know about the formation date and the named managers on the Texas LLC. That's not a detail. That's the whole timeline. The day the entity was formed and who signed it is the day control actually changed. Whatever the January language said, it's a Secretary of State search. We're running it before the episode locks, and if it lands on time, you'll hear it. But honestly, we don't know. Three, the FAA record. Who currently holds the M20 type certificates and whether any production certificate is moved? The FAA registry doesn't do press releases either, but it doesn't lie. If those type certificates are transferred, there should be paperwork. And a word on why item three is checkable at all. Because it's the one piece of federal record keeping in this story. See type certificates are FAA administered assets. They transfer by application. The holder of the record is a public record, right? And that's the truth. And the registry doesn't care about anybody's press strategy. So if the M20 certificates moved, whenever they did move, there should be a date and a name on the file with the FAA. The same is true of any production certificate. That is the rare corner of general aviation where opacity is structurally impossible, which is exactly why it's the first place of reconstruction like this. One should look. And the last place anyone should make a claim without looking. 4. What became of Mooney International Corporation and US Financial LLC? Those were the entities from the last chapter of Mooney's corporate story. And as we know, companies just don't evaporate. They dissolve, or they merge, or assets are conveyed, or they're defaulted. Which one happened here is a fact with a filing attached, and it's somewhere. Five. Where the hell did the capital come from? A $3 million parts program? Plus whatever the auction and the assembly cost? That money does have a source. I'm not going to speculate about it on air, not one word, because speculation about financing is where careful reporting goes to die. It's on the list because it belongs on the list, though. Six, what's actually operating today versus what's on that website? Because a divisions tab is a claim. Machines running, parts shipping, employees badging in, those are facts. The distance between the two is currently, well, unmeasured. And let me say this as clearly as I can because it's the sentence that keeps this episode honest. Every single one of those six could have a boring, legitimate answer. Asset purchases don't require press releases. Private companies owe the public absolutely nothing. Stewardship, those deals evolve into ownership deals. It happens every day of the week, lawfully and quietly, and the only thing unusual here may turn out to be the silence. Not anything the silence contains. So where does this land? Well, not on suspicion. I promised you that at the top, and everything we walk through today survives without it. It lands on something structural and I think more important though. Here's what actually bothers me. This is a market where an eight-figure asset, a type certificate, a factory, the parts lifeline for eleven thousand aircraft can change hands. And the people whose airplanes depend on it find out from a menu item on a on a website. That's ridiculous. Not a filing they were sent, not a letter they were mailed, a divisions tab, and the industry's reaction to the extent there's been one at all. Well, it's been a shrug. One or two Facebook posts. Because opacity is the default setting in this business. It's always has been. No price reporting, no disclosure culture, no obligation to the fleet. Compare it to any other market where ordinary people hold six figure assets. If the company servicing your mortgage changes hands, federal law requires that you be notified in writing. With dates, with names. If a public company can change control, there's a filing within days and the whole market reads it. If the sole manufacturer of parts for your six figure airplane changes hands, silence is legal, customary, and apparently unremarkable. The airplane in your hangar can lose or gain ten percent of its value based on facts you have no mechanism to learn. We accept that in aviation, and we shouldn't. Not because anyone in the story did anything wrong. The record before me today shows no such thing, and I want that sentence in this episode for betum. We shouldn't accept it because opacity costs owners real money. It costs them at appraisal time, when material facts about their assets future are knowable. It costs them at the sale time, when a buyer prices the uncertainty instead of the airplane. And it costs them at the parts counter, where a captive customer negotiates against a mystery. Guys, sunlight isn't a courtesy in an asset market. It's infrastructure, and Piston General Aviation has never built it. So let me end with a door open. Instead of a closed argument. To whoever is running Lascum Mooney, and Carryville is a small enough town that I suspect you're listening. My seat is always open for you, unedited, whatever length you want, any week you want. Walk us through the structure, the timeline, walk me through the plan for the fleet. Every question in segment five you can answer in your own words, and this show will run it straight. Because if the plan is what the website says it is, a funded, integrated industrial platform keeping two legendary fleets flying, then honestly, that's a good story. And it might be a great one. And it deserves way better than a divisions tab. So that's the show. One masthead, two legends. There's six open questions and zero allegations. Check our math at every step. The sources are in the show notes. If this episode taught you something about how assets actually move in this industry, do the thing. Follow, like, subscribe, leave me a review, and send it to one Mooney owner. Because they got eleven thousand friends who need to see it. Keep the mailbag coming. And if you got documents, if you got auction results, filings, anything public on the record, the inbox is open and sources stay protected. With that, I am Jason Zulberbrand. This has been the truth about the aviation market. The market doesn't care what the website says, it only cares what the record shows. Until then, we'll see you next week. Fly safe and stay smart.