I think that one thing that really hurt them badly was having Sanwa pulling Airtronics from the US market. Hobby People was the US distributor for Airtronics and I imagine it took a huge hit on their bottom line to see it go. Now many may say that Airtronics wasn't a huge part of airplane radios, and it might not be. But when it comes to ground radios Airtronics is a leader and a lot of the bigger named drivers used Airtronics radios. So I think that may be a good contributor to this happening.
One thing I would like to know with HP going out is where will Magnum engines be sold? In this day and age OS and Saito engines are high priced and in my opinion you are paying partly for the names. Magnum engines have always been a lower cost good engine that represented an alternative to the higher priced engines out there. I hope that there will still be somebody out there that will be distributing them in the US now that HP is gone belly up.
It is a sad day to see another hobby company go down the drain.
Ken