Based loosely on the Piper Pawnee, the first two prototypes used damaged Pawnee frames. The third prototype, built in 1992, was the first all-original airframe. The GA-200 was fully certificated on 1 March 1991. Certificate of Type Approval No. 83-6 for the GA200 was issued by the Australian Civil Aviation Authority on that date; the first to be issued for a totally new aircraft design in Australia since the GAF Nomad, 20 years earlier. The certification basis was the Australian certification standards, Civil Aviation Orders, Sections 101.16 and 101.22. These standards in turn incorporated the airworthiness standards of Part 23 of the US Federal Aviation Regulations. To date, 50 GA200 aircraft have been manufactured at GippsAero's base at the Latrobe Valley Airport, 28 of which have been exported to countries throughout the world including New Zealand, China, the United States, Canada, South Africa and Brazil. In the late 1990s, GA200 production was scaled down to make way for the GA8 Airvan. The "strut braced" design concept was chosen to allow the minimum possible weight for the wing, saving approximately 45 kg (100 lb) over a cantilever spar design. This allows a correspondingly greater maximum payload for a given empty weight. The configuration also provides a very “crashworthy” structure to provide a good “fly-on” capability following an obstacle strike. The design has been optimised for maximum strength-to-weight ratio by using “state of the art” finite element computer analysis methods. An initial conservative retirement life of 15,000 hours for critical structural components has been granted by the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority. This life can be extended as results of on-going tests becomes available. For more information on thedesign, plus variants, click here.
