Green Energy Enterprises Inc. (GYOG)

[spencyg]

I would venture a guess that the retractable floats are significantly heavier than their fixed counterparts. I have already described why I believe this, but I suppose I can do it again.
The floats ARE heavy, regardless of whether they retract or are fixed. Planes with fixed floats have either no land-based landing gear, or very lightweight retractable gear built into each corner of the floats.

EXAMPLE

http://www.can-zacaviation.com/floats/floats.htm

Standard retractable landing gear isn't all that heavy and doesn't require much force to extend and retract. Typically these units are powered by a very small hydraulic system which is powered by the onboard DC electric power supply.

http://flighttraining.aopa.org/students/presolo/topics/retractable.html

For moving around components which are as massive as pontoons, the hydraulics must be increased in size, and as a result, the amount of hydraulic fluid carried on board is greater, as is the size of the pump, the size of the motor powering the pump, the valves, the fittings, the actuators (cylinders), etc. Then the mounting points for the swiveling linkages need to be very robust to deal with the leverage imposed on them by the outstretched pontoons. The linkages between the pontoons and the mounting points need to be much more robust then their fixed-float counterparts because the use of triangulating wires or lightweight struts to add lightweight rigidity in a standard setup can't be used (see the first link again) because of the actuations required in the retracting mechanism. All of this adds weight and plenty of it.

THEN they want to add retractable landing wheels to the setup, basically adding the aforementioned retractable landing gear setup on top of the retractable floats, as they don't appear to share linkages, and could only share a portion of the hydraulics.

So what does all this mean? It means that wing loading is going to be increased, and/or payload is decreased. If this system isn't going to work for all aircraft which currently can be fitted with standard floats, than we just cut the available market down significantly.

Effects of wing loading on flight performance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_loading

So we have a system that is potentially heavy, undoubtedly more complex, and likely specific to a relatively small number of aircraft. Obviously, we have been told that Tigerfish is not a significant portion of QASP's future profile, but I, for one, am nervious about the decision making power of the company if they consider this $5M investment to be sound and capable of making the corporation at least as much money as they have spent, and presumably, a profit. I don't think it was thought out well.

All of this is my own opinion and based on my own DD. It is worth about as much as you paid to read it...

I.E. Probably less than $0.02....or $.024 as the case may be.