Hi Ron. We're sorry for your friend's frustration and experience. And we recognize and appreciate that people are being incredibly patient and understanding during complex times. Feel free to have your friend reach out to me directly at
[email protected] if he'd like - I'm glad to talk with him!
First of all: Yes, right now things are running a little later/longer than has been our typical timeline. So, it might be helpful in this context to let people know
why things are running a bit late. Some of what you're guessing might be the reason is pretty much spot on. In reality, it's been a combination of things:
1. COVID has meant that our staff is scattered around in some cases, rather than working in the office. This affects all of our office teams to some degree, and probably people are talking to more than one person a little more often than was the case pre-COVID. We try to minimize this, but it's impossible to fully prevent of course. Sorry your friend found it frustrating - we understand.
2. Wildfires completely shut us down for several days in our factory production, crating, parts, orders, shipping/receiving and literally every other team at Van's. Many of our us were displaced from our homes and/or prepared to leave on a moment's notice. One employee's home was unfortunately burned down. Thanksfully that fire risk is in the past at this point and we are no longer directly impacted by the fires.
3. On top of all that, business has actually been exceptionally good this year. Two weeks before the wildfires, we quite literally had our busiest kit sales week in the history of the company. That's a really good problem to have, but it does mean that the line of orders got a bit longer than is typical around here. We have a lot of people working very hard to get things out the door as soon as possible, and we've hired more people at Van's to help make that happen. So, please know that we're working hard to deliver as soon as we possibly can.
So... COVID impacts - plus a significantly busy kit sales period and the related backlog of orders, and on top of that the untimely and severely impacting wildfires - have certainly affected us. That's why things are running a bit longer right now. No excuses, of course, but it certainly has also had some amount of impact on customer interactions with us over the past little while.
We're working hard and we'll definitely do the very best we can to provide great service and make people happy. The RV-14 your friend is ordering is an amazing airplane (I know this personally, since I got to do a bunch of incredibly fun test flying in the airplane with our new higher-horsepower engine configuration a few weeks ago - just wow!). While the current crating workload and delays are frustrating for us all, we want you to know that the people who work on that team are knocking it out of the park in their work to get kits shipped, and in the end it's certainly worth the wait.
greg