My purpose in mentioning ADs was to get some action on the 71 days since the carb float SB was laid on us.
Those 71 days with no communications beyond a video to my mind reflect a lousy customer focus for any company and especially one ramping up sales in a large new market....the USA. I fly from the busiest GA airport in Southern California which is a very big market for LSAs and training airplanes and the S-LSA certainly is one of those. There are about 100 very tired C-172s and 152s flitting around here that need to be replaced and the S-LSA is perfect for that. But there are only five Rotax engines on the field and two of them are on one airplane, a Tecnam.
I also need to ask you to remember that guys like me are flying an RV12 and not somewhere in the building process so the SB represents a roadblock in our natural desire to go get one of those $20 hamburgers which used to be $150 hamburgers
I have been flying for about 40 years and I've owned a lot of airplanes and I've seen a lot of ADs and "mandatory" SBs from such wonderful people as Continental, Beech, Piper, Cessna and Lycoming; I know how those things hurt. And, the FAA is among my least favorite parts of an increasingly predatory government.....maybe a click better than the IRS, but that ain't saying much
One of the posters below has called attention to our problem with the carb SB by providing a list of other cases in which Rotax has been kind of deaf. That was all news to me as a newby. But I bet it was also news to some others who ain't newbies and it fits perfectly with the questions I asked and with the suggestion that maybe there are better ways to get Rotax to listen to its customers a little better.
I talked with Van's about all of this and their main guy for S-LSAs said that he was sure Rotax was working pretty hard to fix this. He pointed out that the carb floats are from somebody else further down the supply chain which produces delay. He also reminded me that we live in a nation of predatory lawyers who see GA as a big fat target so Rotax and Van's has to be sure about anything before they jump. (I hope there ain't any of those predatory lawyers on these pages just waiting to lecture me some more about my iconoclasm)
Some of us would feel better if there were more communications from Rotax about this.
EBB