[mikeash]

There are reasons why LSAs cost $70k. They're not looking to fly anything until 2015, and that's lots of time for reality to seep in. I wouldn't be surprised if they discovered that $15k was optimistic by a factor of about 5....

[jamie_ca]

You can buy a recent Quad City Challenger kit for much less than that, and even fully assembled by someone else you're looking in the $30k range http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_City_Challenger#cite_note-...

I'm assuming they're planning on making it a partial kit, and if you're expected to 3d print some of the parts $15k for "other" supplies (mostly avionics and engine) sounds pretty reasonable to me.