So I wonder if it is a Great Planes decision to discontinue these in the US?

No idea. Try calling or emailing Ann Marie Cross. She will get you a straight answer.
If I remember correctly, Tower has been in and out of stock with these many times over the years, so I am not particularly worried. Besides, there are many places around the planet that stock the 91. Point and click and give them your credit card. I order stuff from Japan, Germany, whatever. If there is no U.S. distribution, you can bet that there will be heavy competition from distributors in Japan and Singapore and such that will want your business.

Her email address is disabled through this forum!

So I just PM'd her and asked her to have a look at the threads in the Jets forum here. We shall see what she has to say!

Gentlemen,
The OS 91 DF has not been available to us for months. Our last request for an order was told that engines would not be produced in the near future. Based upon repeated and VERY adamant complaints from modelers who are angry with us when we cannot provide an instock date, or the date slips, and insufficient demand to justify a large enough order for OS to produce the engines, we have D coded (discontinued) them for us here in the states.

The 46 is in a similar situation. The demand is simply not high enough to justify Japan producing a run of hte engines. when sufficient back orders exist to justify them, then Japan will produce a single run of the engine, unless it is such a long time they choose to discontinue it altogether.

Unfortunately, friends, the system runs on demand. And if there isn't sufficient demand, then the engines won't be produced.

Sounds like you guys in need of a DF engine better just order one. Then when enough of you have them ordered they will build another batch!

I called a number of hobby stores today and was told by nearly everybody that they had none in stock and that they were discontinued and were not able to order them.

Luckily I found one place that had one sitting on the shelf and I snatched it up real quick! It is the small head version so won't be any good with the Byron setup, but beggars can't be choosers!

How do we communicate the demand if hobby stores won't take orders? They just say that they have been discontinued and can't be ordered!

Unfortunately, there was zero demand for so long they are now labeled as D coded and can not be ordered except as special orders.

Per a few very adamant DF users persuaded us to carry the 46DF again, and we pursuaded Japan to do a run to provide them for us. Sales were nowhere near what we would normally look for when ordering engines, but we continued to do so as long as OS had them to offer us. We still have an order in place for additional 46DFs and we can hope that we will eventually get engines to meet these orders when Japan has sufficient back orders for them, if they do not decide to discontinue them without filling the outstanding orders.

AnnMarie,

I appreciate your quick response to this thread. I PM'd you to have a look and try and fill us in on the situation. Thanks for your response.

Just one question though, what sort of numbers are we talking about to make a production run viable? Is this something you can share with us?

Are we talking an order for 500 engines or 5000?