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.'"

Comments

Cost

[asmkm22]

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?

Re:COST

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Yes. A new Cessna 172 Skyhawk probably cost $310,000 or more.

Even renting an older (though nice and very well-maintained) airplane is $90/hr, which at least includes fuel.

Some people kit-build planes, but that's a lot of work and it all has to be done and maintained right.

Insurance is expensive. Renting a hangar stall is expensive. Continuing education is expensive.

Regulations don't help, though there are low-regulation categories. Those are a considerably higher risk category because some of the people that take advantage of the lower barrier to entry are a bit more lax in doing things properly.

Learning to fly often isn't a good career move because pilots are now generally paid poorly.

One really has to want to fly badly, especially to give up several other hobbies to afford flying.

Re:Cost

[rtb61]

Have you not woken up to reality yet. A countries economic growth does not count for shit if only the top 1% get the benefit whilst the rest get screwed. Want to see a country grow, that only happens when the middle class economic wealth growths, they are the real driver, the real circulator of wealth. The top 1% are just parasites and like parasites they starve out the rest of the system so they grow ever more bloated.

The middle class got screwed and they generated the numbers when it came to private flying, hence the massive drop. The top 1% want 99% poor, no middle class because the middle class are the power and the greatest threat to the psychopathic dominance of the 1%, who are conspiring to starve the middle class out of existence and have done so for the last thirty years.

Re:Cost

[Anonymous Coward]

We are working on Obama's 6th year as president. This is Obama's economy, now.

Yes, it is. Have you noticed how it's getting better? The economy was in dire straits before he took office, now it's recovering.

We're much better off than the fall-off under Bush.

Did you want it to improve faster? Who's been obstructing Obama's policies again??

I know it's hard for liberals to come to terms with facts they disagree with.

Not as hard as it is for Conservatives to stick to reality, as the reason flap with the CBO numbers shows. Or any other complaints they have, like how the Right-wing wouldn't get upset over a multicultural commercial(Poor Coca-Cola!), how the government is growing (its shrinking), how Obama isn't deporting illegal immigrants (He's deported more than Bush had), and so forth.

Some of you continue to blame Reagan on this very thread, despite 8 years of Clinton and another 5 years of Obama.

Because many policies of Reagan and his kindred are still in effect, and are influencing things to this day. Besides, have you seen the posts complaining about the Great Society and the New Deal? Have you complained about them being out of date?

No? Why ever not?

I'm not at all surprised you still blame Bush. He's good for you to scape-goat for at least another 20 years.

Don't worry, you'll be blaming Obama till the next millennium.

At least Bush and Republicans tried to warn of the unsustainable Freddy and Fannie, while Democrats fought any possibility of reform tooth and nail, under the guise of protecting the middle class. Democrats protected the middle class real good, didn't they?

Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae weren't the problem in themselves, it was the investment bankers and other financial manipulators who caused the problems, you're blaming the victims for what happened.

Which much like Bush's fixes, is the wrong direction to go.

But you're right, Democrats didn't do enough to protect the middle class, if they had, we'd have had some financial crooks taken to court and put in jail.

Bush does share some blame, though, due to his over-encouragement of home ownership and his failure to recognize the impending catastrophe, as did nearly every other politician. However, the roots of the meltdown can clearly be traced back to the Democrat policies of the 90s, where the CRA and related bank regulations were strengthened, lending standards were weakened, and Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs), Freddie and Fannie, were required to purchase increasingly more of the mortgage market, primarily riskier lower-income loans, through Clinton's National Homeownership Strategy (NHS).

Try again, CRA didn't cause the problems. Try Gramm–Leach–Bliley instead of the CRA.

Why do you look to the ones who are suffering from the misconduct of others, rather than blaming the people gaining advantage out of it?

There's nothing conservative about Obama, his policies, or Obamacare. Just because he fooled you gullible liberals with his hope-and-change schtick, doesn't mean he's a conservative. I'd love to hear your justification for such a claim.

What, you've not heard about how the Stimulus was full of tax cuts, how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was straight out of the Heritage Foundation's playbook? If you're only hearing about it now, I'm surprised.

A liberal healthcare reform would have been built around actual socialized medicine, not insurance company handouts, and an economic stimulus from the left-wing would have had a WPA equivalent, not more tax cuts for millionaires.

The problem is MUCH, much wider ...

[UnknownSoldier]

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.

Re:The problem is MUCH, much wider ...

[NoImNotNineVolt]

I can't help but suggest that maybe the younger crowd isn't buying into these things because of the development of new technologies.

Motorcycles and aviation catered to a certain demographic of people looking to get out there and do something interesting, something crazy. Perhaps they were the adrenaline junkies of their time. Today, if you're an adrenaline junkie, there are plenty of more accessible alternatives. You can go skydiving with little more than a couple bucks in your wallet. Hell, you can play Grand Theft Auto at your buddy's house for free. I'm not suggesting that playing a video game is the same thing as riding a motorcycle, but merely that it can be a substitute [albeit a poor one].

Libraries and newspapers are dying, well, for the same reason the buggy whip industry died. There's really no good reason for someone to print stuff out and distribute it physically when it's so much easier to distribute information digitally. Sure, some people prefer real paper [myself included], but some people prefer horses over cars. That didn't stop the automobile from taking over, leaving equestrianism as a hobby for those with a peculiar interest.

Classical music fascinates me. Its claimed death aside, I find the 'timeless' sense of classical music truly interesting. When we think of music from 200, 300, 500 years ago, we think of classical music. Of course, there must have surely been "folk" music around at the time as well, but we don't really think of that. "Folk" music seems to be largely forgotten by history. Today, we see all this pop music permeating contemporary culture. However, 200, 300, 500 years from now, will all our rock & roll, rap, and dubstep be largely forgotten along the mass of other "folk" music? Will people be talking of our "contemporary classical" composers (I can't even name one) as the benchmark for our generation while being ignorant of Elvis, Rakim, and Bassnectar?

To contradict what I just said about classical music: complaining about the death of classical music is like complaining about the death of women's shoulder pads. Culture changes, but it doesn't disappear. It's not like people have stopped listening to music, or stopped making music.

Business opportunity?

[swb]

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.

Not BIG but OVERREACHING gov't [was Re:Cost]

[ReallyEvilCanine]

Along with FAA bullshit like increased ramp checks and the resulting harsh punishment for the most minor of infractions (OhNOES! There's an old sectional map buried under the back seat!), the biggest killer is -- not surprisingly -- DHS. Loads of additional bullshit regulations, security theatre, outright bullying. The surprise searches-- conducted under any auspice (ICE, CBP, general Tairism) -- are claimed (currently untested in court) to be superconstitutional, meaning they do this without warrant, court order, active investigation, or any other reason. And in inspecting the aircraft they also inspect all private contents of all pax, not just that of the owner or pilot being run.

Here's a story from last September that no one saw. Pay careful attention to the harassment about 2/3 of the way down:

Gabriel Silverstein of New York flies using flight plans as standard procedure, said the Iowa state troopers who detained him in Iowa City this spring were more blatant [than those in another case]. “It was, ‘We are inspecting your plane,’ not, ‘May we search your plane?’ ” Mr. Silverstein said.

In the two-hour encounter one of the lawmen advised him to confess to possessing “a little personal-use dope and it’ll be all over and easy.” Mr. Silverstein said he was hardly about to make such a confession, considering that he refrains from drinking coffee, much less anything illegal.

The Iowa City stop was the second for him in four days. Mr. Silverstein also had been visited by two Customs agents in Hobart, Okla., during a fuel stop on the outbound leg of a business trip from New Jersey to California and back with his husband. They checked his paperwork and quickly inspected his baggage while he fueled the plane, he said.

That's a pretty damned clear set-up for a slam-dunk civil forfeiture case with a bonus uncontested drug possession charge.

Re:I abandoned thoughts of getting a pilot's licen

[Rich0]

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.

Pilot here.

[KiranWolf]

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.

Not Cost!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.