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Ugly Trends Threaten Aviation Industry
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post reports, 'In the past several decades, the number of private and recreational pilots across the country has plummeted, as has the number of small aircraft being manufactured — trends that some say have been accelerated by increasingly strict federal regulations. If the decline continues, it will spell trouble for entrepreneurs ... Since 1980, the number of pilots in the country has nosedived from about 827,000 in 1980 to 617,000, according to the Frederick, Md.-based Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. During about the same period, data from the General Aviation Manufacturers Association in Washington show that production of single-engine planes plunged from 14,000 per year to fewer than 700.'"
Amazingly, pretty much nothing about people's income has kept pace with the cost of living during the last 30 years. And they are wondering why less people are flying airplanes?
Except for those that got wrecked, most of those planes from 1980 are still flying. So if there are fewer pilots, it's no surprise that few new planes are being built.
Well perhaps if planes did not cost as much as high end luxury cars (i'm sure federal regulations are some of that cost). More people would be into flying. Just learning to fly is expensive. It is a hobby only the well to do can afford anymore.
I spent pretty much my whole childhood hanging out at the local general avaition field. Gone were the days when pilots felt secure taking some local kid up for a flight. And that was 30 years ago.
The cost of manufacturers liability awards is what's killing the light aircraft industry in the USA.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
$100 hamburgers are gone now days fuel costs have gone up alot.
The way one instructor pilot explained it to me is that it is lawsuits not regulations that are killing off manufacturing for the private pilot audience. He had numerous examples of pilot error, cited in the FAA accident report, that still led to juries awarding big settlements to families for various bogus reasons. Leading to a trend towards kit aircraft these days. These aircraft get a big "experimental" sticker on the fuselage and apparently this protects the designers sufficiently.
So few comments today.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The motorcycle community is facing the exact same problem of declining numbers.
Libraries are facing the same problem.
Classical music is facing the same problem.
Newspaper readers are dwindling.
The source of the problem is the same:
There are less and less younger pilots, riders, readers, etc. interested.
As the Baby Boomers slowly are forced to give up their passion / hobbies due to age, sickness, etc the rate of exit is significantly >>> the rate of entering. :-/ Liability (getting sued) and Risks (crashing) are seen as "not worth it" by the younger crowd. Like any community, you need enough "new blood" to sustain it and that isn't happening. Is that a bad thing? I don't know, but we can see trends and it looks like our world is changing. I guess that is the million dollar question: Is it changing for the better ?
I also wonder if /. mirrors this change to some degree? You have new "hip" / "emo" sites like Reddit, Dig, 4chan, etc., yet sites like /. have been around "forever" in internet time but for the most part people don't want "deep intellectual stimulation" anymore. They want "sound bites." the "10-second news."
The same trend is also happening in gaming; I call it "Fast Food Gaming" -- dumbed down button mashing of which Diablo 3, COD, etc. are the perfect examples. Now there is a time and a place for less cerebral challenges but I wonder if we're losing something along the way ...
Developing the heart & soul of personal relationships, and we no longer care about experiencing and exploring our passions physically. Why, when we can do it "all" virtually?
--
Piracy === Disrespect.
Piracy =/= Theft.
As a private pilot, doing short hops in your own plane is nice. You skip the humiliation of the TSA.
Unless you own a jet, longer flights are hard to do in a private plane. Range and speed limit how far is practical to travel in a few hours on your own.
I kind of wonder if there's a business opportunity in all this.
Create a national chain of airplane rentals and subsidize the cost of obtaining a pilot's license. Encourage the use of rented planes for regional travel. Build a common air fleet of simple to fly, fuel efficient planes with modern materials and avionics.
There's probably a group of wannabe owners and former owners who like to fly and would fly more often and for more utility but can't afford their own planes. Plus existing rentals aren't setup like car rentals and don't promote them for travel. Discounts or credits could be offered for pilots who would fly a "one way" plane back or to its next destination, since some would fly for free because they could.
I would think there would be an unmet aviation need out there.
I'm an airplane pilot and glider instructor, I donated my time to the local glider club. I stopped instructing in part because I was concerned about the liability if a student should be in an accident and someone was hurt. Paying for hefty liability insurance wasn't really practical for me, especially as I wasn't getting any income from it. I pretty much gave the whole thing up shortly after 9/11 when the security regulations started to become too intrusive. It was also becoming too expensive, even for gliders, especially as insurance and gas costs increased.
I've trained many students who went on to become pilots, some became airplane pilots from their exposure to aviation in gliders, some became instructors (a few of whom I trained to be instructors). Without instructors, you don't get student pilots. Without student pilots, you don't get new pilots, or new instructors.
ok, so clearly the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... that someone else linked to isn't working and needs to be strengthened to give manufacturers of aircraft stronger immunity against this kind of lawsuit (i.e. protection strong enough so that the manufacturer can get it thrown out of court before a jury even gets to it)
Maybe pass a law that gives manufacturers strong immunity from lawsuits (civil and criminal) if there is a valid FAA report showing that the manufacturers aren't to blame.
A big part of this trend is the aging of pilots trained in the Vietnam war. The youngest of them are in their 60's. When the war ended, the US government's "learn to fly for free*" program sharply contracted.
* Certain sacrifices required.
Before spewing the data that you have no way of substantiating (because it is simply not true), you should check the statistics, say the well known Joseph T. Nall Report on the safety trends in aviation. Private, recreational, and sport pilots account for barely 50 % of all the accidents. There are plenty of `commercial crashes' around. I have seen two this year with my very eyes. A lot of accidents happen in training (not all of them deadly), with an instructor (who is a commercial pilot at least) on board. A lot of factors contribute to accidents, and the ailine industry, of course, does everything possible to assure everybody that flying is safe. For the most part, it is. The Korean pilot you are referring to was hardly `inexperienced', he had 10,000 hours IN TYPE. He was just badly taught. There is more to commercial flying than airlines though. By the way, just nitpicking, but General Aviation includes commercial pilots, as well. I am a flight instructor by trade (one of them, anyway)
Because those high performance 400 mph prop planes were piloted by 20 year olds with great eyesight and reflexes (and a depressingly large fatality rate). Your average 50 year old dentist should be in a Cessna, not a P51.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The only way I think you could do it was the way my old neighbor did- he was a master mechanic who was working on his FAA certificate. He'd signed up with a couple of wealthier folks and he got a fraction of the plane free if he did the work on it.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
There's a lot of money to be made in General Aviation.
I know, because I put it there!
Mal.
I don't think LSA is so much a "problem" as simply not delivering on its planned promise.
The idea was new LSA-compliant aircraft would sell for about the price of your typical 40+ year old Pipers and Cessnas (the $25,000-50,000 range - and mainly toward the low end of that spectrum), which would make them an attractive option for new pilots pursuing flight training to buy and fly at a cost similar to a boat or car.
The reality is most LSAs are a far cry from the simple aircraft that you can find as a "Legacy LSA" - fancy glass panels and relatively-well-appointed interiors are the norm rather than the exception, and adding manufacturer liability and low volume on to that prices are easily north of $100,000. That means most of the activity has been in the "Legacy LSA" end of the business - Cessna 150s, Piper Cubs, and the like - and at that end it's often older pilots choosing to "downgrade" to an LSA and exercise Sport Pilot privileges rather than continuing to keep up a third-class medical certificate to be able to fly.
/~mikeg
Here's a story from last September that no one saw. Pay careful attention to the harassment about 2/3 of the way down:
That's a pretty damned clear set-up for a slam-dunk civil forfeiture case with a bonus uncontested drug possession charge.
I'm in a similar position. I could get a pilots license without a whole lot more time investment but there are a bunch of things that cumulative caused me to stop my training. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed the time I spent on lessons and don't consider it a waste for the experience. Some of the issues I found are:
1. I'm reading slashdot, ok. I'm the sort of person who contributes to the linux distro he runs, has a diskless PXE mythtv front-end in the living room, and so on. However, despite working at a fairly decent IT job the only planes I could really afford to fly only contain integrated circuits in the (fairly old) radios.
2. The costs just really add up even when when flying bare bones. I could take a Sat afternoon to go have lunch at an airport 60 miles away, for $450. I could probably drive there in the same amount of time. For a longer distance trip the plane might be faster but unless I just fly there and back the owner is going to want to be compensated for the time it is sitting on the ground while his fixed costs accrue. If I'm the owner, well I'm paying for those fixed costs so I'm not saving anything.
3. The regulatory atmosphere makes just about any kind of modern technology incredibly expensive. We're talking $1k for a radio, or $10k for a GPS that might have looked modern in the mid-90s (oh, and $3k/yr database updates). You can get modern glass cockpits but that costs more than the 40 year old plane that you want to install it into. Some of these devices can be bought at 1/10th the cost minus their certification, so that they can only be legally used in an experimental plane (despite being identical hardware).
4. The costs (driven by regulation, largely) mean that many pilots don't want to invest in technologies that improve safety. Few aircraft are equipped with ADS-B/TCAS, and pilots lobby to get rid of regulations that would require their installation. Heck, pilots lobby to prevent the requirement to even install radios in planes.
5. Honestly, the flying community really comes across to me as curmudgeony. Everybody wants to do everything the way it was done 50 years ago. Things like fuel injection, engine computers, automatic fuel mixture, and automatic transmissions are considered scary new experimental technologies. We fly around in planes with float carburetors which can ice up on humid days. Costs certainly interfere with modernization, but so does the culture.
6. Anything having to do with the FAA is really stuck in the 60s. Official weather products are all coded or formatted to be transmittable on a 45 baud teletype, or a radio FAX (if you listened to one of these you could practically demodulate the transmission in your head). Exams contain questions on equipment that few pilots have equipped in the last decade. Exam questions give wind problems that require estimating the travel time on a 75mile flight to the nearest minute, or require interpreting obscure symbols on charts that nobody uses, and which are only used on the ground where anybody can look up the conventions. Instructors openly talk about students having to learn flight planning techniques that nobody actually uses in real world flying.
I found that most of the things I was interested in about flying weren't really accessible at a cost that most could afford. I'd rather fly a flight sim where fuel is free, any aircraft can have a glass panel, and so on. Sure, it doesn't actually go anywhere, but if you want a plane that gets you someplace faster than a car you're talking about serious money.
Then for me personally I really struggled to deal with moving air. I really had no trouble with the concepts, but it felt like I was swimming in a rip tide half the time I was in the air, constantly being bumped about by erratic currents and having to adjust. Sure, I could land the thing, but I was never really quite sure when taking off if my next flight would be my last. My instructor would tell me that I was doing everything just fine, but it felt like skillfully driving down the middle of a freeway coated in ice; perhaps some would fine this exhilarating, but for me it was bordering on terrifying.
The stagnation of design in the factory-built market was caused by a few jury decisions to hold manufacturers liable for crashes, not by government regulation. The liability problem made USA manufacturers stop introducing bold design changes. The "51% rule" holds that if the customer builds an airplane himself, then he's the manufacturer and assumes liability. This has caused all of the interesting design progress to show up in the kit plane market instead of in the factory-built market. (Two examples are composite construction and canard wings, although both features are available factory-built from non-USA manufacturers.) Government regulation has helped bring new pilots into the fold with the recent introduction of the Sport Light Aircraft pilot's license.
Separate from the airplane price issue, though, is that that geeky guys that might have become private pilots are diverted today into electronics and software. "Tech" used to mean airplanes.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
With gas going up and the hard-won benefits of our grandparents' unions eroding, it probably won't be much longer before the majority of Americans can't afford to own or operate any private vehicle, much less one that flies. Enjoy your bleak-ass future, bitches, I'm having another cigarette!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I was a pilot many years ago and heard aviation stories from the 60s and before. Those stories basically had lots of people having fun with their airplanes. Many people flew crappy old airplanes that they either fixed themselves or knew someone who could fix them. Maybe an old mechanic from WWII. The planes ran on car gas and people generally knew the limitations of these planes. In many cases a license was a formality which after many years of flying people might go in and get their license.
But by the time I was flying the cowboys were mostly gone and the rule books were out and self righteous people ran around thumping the rule books like they were bibles. So instead of training people to have safe fun, a private pilots license was all about creating little airline pilots. There was this foolish belief that enough rules and enough training would keep people from augering in. I have read that small plane manufactured in 2014 will have insurance as nearly 50% of its cost. This might be important for a plane used in commercial passenger services but the reality is that if I were to get back into flying it would be for fun. A great safety mechanism is actually available to put into crappy airplanes and that is a parachute. Yes there are parachutes for the small planes themselves; wing falls off, pull the chute. This almost makes small planes idiot proof.
The funny thing is that in my few years of flying I found out how to figure out who was going to die. If they were perfectionists who talked endlessly about following the rules and how yahoos were giving pilots a bad name and wanted ever greater training and certifications they were dead the first time something went wrong. These were people who would have an engine failure and pick the absolute worst place to have a forced landing. Or do a perfect forced landing with all the perfect radio patter, until they flew into the high tension power lines.
But the people who thought that half of their checklist was done by farting and burping, and were just as happy to take off from a taxiway were basically immortal.
To give a great example there were a crew of drug smugglers about 40 minutes of flying from my home base who owned a bunch of crappy planes that they ducktaped together and they took off and landed on these hilly dirt roads and only one license among the lot of them. After 30 years of activity the only thing that shut them down was being arrested for the smuggling part. No crashes.
But at my flying school we made bets as to who would crash and wrote their names on a wall. About 15 years after leaving I got an out of the blue letter from the guy who managed the airport and he included a letter with about 80% of the names crossed off. They had all had a serious crash. It was dead easy to identify these guys. They were typically around 50, slightly portly, had that cop look, and always had a mustache. They took flying way too seriously and would say things like, "You aren't ready for that." The that being something that wasn't actually much, just more than they had.
The reality is that flying is really really easy. Any monkey can learn to fly. Few people who enter flying school will fail, they might chicken out or run out of money but few will fail. But what is basically impossible to train for and certainly not tested is keeping a cool head. When things go wrong, your training will help but you have to adapt. Sometimes you are handed an easy emergency such as engine failure at altitude. But often you are handed something such as a partial elevator failure that could be potentially handled by quickly changed the center of mass of the airplane (moving everyone to the back) and then using the throttle as for pitch control. But you don't train for that; you can't. You just have to be able to say, nothing I know is going to work, what can I do. But if you are a rule book thumping dogmatist all you have to hang on to is that someone is to blame for this and they are going to pay.
Now very tiny planes have far fewer rules but quite simply they should designate certain(most) airspaces as near rule free zones. Fly what you want how you want and have fun; do this and you will have people 3D printing something that will blow your mind.
I'm also going to chime in with the "it's too expensive" issue. Flying is amazingly expensive. It's always been expensive, but the costs of aviation have risen along with everything else (and in some cases, much, much faster) while real wages ... haven't.
At my local FBO, airplanes rent for between $110 and $170 an hour wet (with fuel) depending on the type and equipment. If you're a student, expect to pay between $25 and $50 an hour for instruction, and the average student (so I'm told) requires between 50 and 60 hours of instruction before they're ready to sit for exams. Add in about $200 for your medical and another $500 or so for leaning materials, another few hundred in miscellaneous costs, and the cost just get licensed is, at the low end, around $8,000 and can easily go in excess of $13,000+.
And then you've got your license. Then what? Have you looked at the cost of airplanes recently? There's a reason pretty much nobody buys airplanes anymore. Only clubs and flight schools own airplanes. You want something newer than 40 years old and seats 4 people, it will run you in excess of $50,000. And forget anything new. A new Cessna 172 currently goes for in excess of $300,000.
So yes. It's so expensive even to just learn to fly that it is effectively priced out of all the but (what's left of) the upper middle class and the wealthy.
But there's another issue, too, that I think warrants some attention: health.
So many things that are considered "common" diagnoses now and are easily treatable, such as high blood pressure, ADHD, depression, etc. are considered disqualifying conditions by the FAA. Even though many of these conditions are easily treatable by modern medicine, they're disqualifying for even a third-class (private pilot) medical certificate.
While the costs are what is primarily keeping people away from flying right now, the archaic medical certifying process used by the FAA is not helping.
"Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of 'em are stupider than that!" - George Carlin.
The cost of an airplane is not the issue. If you look back to at least the 1960s, an airplane cost about as much as a middle class house. That has not changed. The cost of OPERATING an airplane HAS changed. It is more expensive. It is more complicated and arcane. I say this as a licensed pilot for the last 25 years. Some things are much easier and safer. TIS and ADS-B have improved traffic awareness. GPS has improved navigation. Moving maps and weather overlays have improved situational awareness tremendously. Some minor improvements in aerodynamics have trickled down to the GA market and that has helped as well.
But the airspace systems is hideously more complex than it was in decades past. Controlled airspace has grown enormously over cities. The day when you could cross the country in a Piper Cub without even so much as a radio are vanishing fast.
All that said, I don't think the complexity or cost is the issue. I think the primary change is social. People returned from military training wanting to do some of the things they did in the service. So amateur radio grew, aviation grew, recreational shooting sports grew, sport diving grew... but if you look at the statistics today, there aren't as many who make the transition from military to civilian life. It ended when the draft ended --and those baby boomers are retiring and dying off.
Most kids approach these endeavors with Grandpa gently hoping a spark will light in their grandchildren. And it doesn't happen. These activities are all perceived as legal liabilities, frightening, and pointless.
The thrill of doing really cool things in aviation/radio/mechanics/shooting sports/etc.. is vanishing fast. These activities remain as expensive as they ever were, but the romance of doing it is just not there. We have killed the adventure and excitement with safety, policies, regulations, and so on. I'm not saying the latter are a bad thing; but people want to feel alive by doing something unique and exciting. Aviation is just another form of transportation and it isn't even particularly glamorous any more. Radio is your cell phone. You can call your buddy overseas for next to nothing any time you like. Who needs a shortwave radio? Guns owners are regarded as social pariahs by much of the population, with politicians and the news media ranting non stop nonsense against them at every opportunity. Backyard mechanics are considered an environmental nuisance by most home-owner associations. There was even a time when kids used to have chemistry labs in their back yard sheds. No longer. If you have a chemistry lab, you are usually regarded as some sort of subversive bomb maker.
We are killing this generation with mediocre education, discouraging technical endeavors at every step, polluting minds with nonsense endeavors from the Internet, and then we sit and wonder why so few kids take any sort of STEM interest.
Aviation isn't the only thing that is dying. It is the curious, entrepreneurial spirit and playfulness of the average teen-age kid that is dying. They're being coddled and protected by every helicopter parent and school administrator around. Then they go to college in record numbers, only to come home and live in the basement for lack of any interest in the world around them.
Societal mediocrity has won. We need to light an afterburner under the maker movement to undo this nonsense. It is killing us as a society.
The requirement is “a definite detractor to business,” Heffernan told the committee. He and several lawmakers noted that the closest individuals come to a medical exam when obtaining a driver’s license is usually a vision test. Meanwhile, most boat operators do not need any medical certifications.
In the case of a car or boat when the operator becomes ill he can pull over and stop. An aircraft is a different matter in that it could kill many more people including the operator if it crashes. There is also the difference that aircraft fly at altitude and the thinner air can exacerbate health issues. One needs to be much more fit to pilot an aircraft than operate a vehicle and boat. By the way, commercial drivers usually require a doctor's exam on license renewal.
The other issue is have these regulations changed recently? I had a glider pilot's license in the '80s. I needed a medical exam and private aviation was pretty healthy then..
can be solved with more regulation.
Unfortunately I am married and I need something that is a bit more refined than that. which drops me in the $68,000 or more category for a 60+ year old aircraft that will need the wings replaced or a major engine service in the next 300-400 hours. Sadly the FAA here doesnt allow cool little cheap planes like you fly. the only aircraft you can buy now that is even remotely like that is either experimental and severely limit you, or 60 to 100 years old and is expensive to keep flying.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.