Golden Age of GA

brien23 said:
1960s through the mid-1970s often referred to as the "golden age" of general aviation, where aircraft production peaked. Flying any rental aircraft over 10 years old was real old and any round engine like a Cessna 195 ancient history. Now 70 year old planes are the normal, I was able to get insurance on a Cessna 310 with only a new rating i got in a PA-23-150 with no other twin time, try that now. So what changed over the years. Why are we in such a dismal tail spin of GA with old 70 year old planes the normal.
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Since 1980, what is referred as the golden era for anything recreational for the middle class that involves leaving their house?
 
Bell206 said:
Except since NASA's AGATE program, the regulatory burden has been simplified and even reduced at the Part 91 recreational levels. Yet that market segment continues to decline even with those incentives. So what additional regulatory relief do you think is needed to reverse that trend?
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Mosaic....

I'm skeptical that does anything as the original LSA approval was nothing more than a blip
 
Clip4 said:
Since 1980, what is referred as the golden era for anything recreational for the middle class that involves leaving their house?
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Go to any storage facility. The volume of toy haulers and campers is absolutely staggering. Definitely the current era there.

A friend just bought a side by side and then a toy hauler. All in almost 100k. All to use 6 times a year.
 
Racerx said:
Go to any storage facility. The volume of toy haulers and campers is absolutely staggering. Definitely the current era there.

A friend just bought a side by side and then a toy hauler. All in almost 100k. All to use 6 times a year.
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Damn, that really puts it in perspective.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
There's an important difference in the mental calculation between necessary and needless risk.
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I think you’ll find only a minute percentage of the driving public actually has the knowledge of the risks to recreational flying to even make that mental calculation. Adjust your sample to include people who do understand that risk and they’ll be jumping in the aircraft with the same regularity as people “hop in their cars without a second thought.” Context is everything in these types of comparisons.

Racerx said:
Mosaic.... I'm skeptical that does anything as the original LSA approval was nothing more than a blip
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Unfortunately, I think MOSAIC at best will only temporarily flatten that decline curve. However, if implemented as I think it will be, it definitely will make recreational flying easier, but I don't see any growth outside certain specific sectors like LSA helicopters or something similar.
 
I think a big thing is just the ridiculous expensiveness for aviation,especially certified aircraft.30k to overhaul an incredibly simple 6 cylinder engine,7k for an aluminum 2 bladed fixed pitch prop,etc,etc.
I get it that aviation parts are engineered and maintained to higher standard then most but there seems to be a lot of “just because we can” pricing.End of rant
 
Jaminky said:
I think a big thing is just the ridiculous expensiveness for aviation,especially certified aircraft.30k to overhaul an incredibly simple 6 cylinder engine,7k for an aluminum 2 bladed fixed pitch prop,etc,etc.
I get it that aviation parts are engineered and maintained to higher standard then most but there seems to be a lot of “just because we can” pricing.End of rant
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Even if a magic wand was waived and tomorrow all prices and expenses were half of today, you would still have people complaining "it's too expensive".
 
Jaminky said:
I think a big thing is just the ridiculous expensiveness for aviation,especially certified aircraft.30k to overhaul an incredibly simple 6 cylinder engine,7k for an aluminum 2 bladed fixed pitch prop,etc,etc.
I get it that aviation parts are engineered and maintained to higher standard then most but there seems to be a lot of “just because we can” pricing.End of rant
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Supply and demand at work. When you have no alternatives, you're a captive audience that's fairly price-inelastic :)

Doc Holliday said:
Even if a magic wand was waived and tomorrow all prices and expenses were half of today, you would still have people complaining "it's too expensive".
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You're not wrong. But half priced everything would be quite nice...
 
WDD said:
People just moved to other things.

Example- In the 60s and 70s the new car model introduction was almost a religious experience. Every 16 year old couldn’t wait to get a license. Today? Not so much, if at all.
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I know of teenagers and even one in her early 20s… no desire to even get a license. And we’re not in a place like NY or LA. Man, when I was in my teens it was one of the biggest goals I had. But - I actually had places to go. Had to go places to hang out with friends. We had the lake, the park, the mall, movies, all that stuff. A lot of the same age kids now are perfectly happy to live in a wholly virtual world, and if they really need to go somewhere (but why??) there’s Uber and Lyft.

In my opinion they have no idea what they’re missing, but I’m old so my opinion no longer matters.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
Supply and demand at work. When you have no alternatives, you're a captive audience that's fairly price-inelastic :)
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In principle I agree. In practice, I’m still scratching my head as to why the hourly rate for aircraft repairs is still well below car shop repairs - at least around here. Would seem to be completely reasonable to be the exact opposite (not that I WANT that…). A car gets a bad oil change and breaks down on the road, it’s an inconvenience. In the air, not so much.

Regardless of cause, with that as a reality it’s no wonder there’s a relative shortage of aviation repair people.
 
Llewtrah381 said:
In principle I agree. In practice, I’m still scratching my head as to why the hourly rate for aircraft repairs is still well below car shop repairs - at least around here. Would seem to be completely reasonable to be the exact opposite (not that I WANT that…). A car gets a bad oil change and breaks down on the road, it’s an inconvenience. In the air, not so much.

Regardless of cause, with that as a reality it’s no wonder there’s a relative shortage of aviation repair people.
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Yep...kinda mind blowing. I've mentioned before that my local pt.145 shop charges $110/hr, whereas the dealer that works on my ag equipment has a shop rate of $150, plus a $250 charge if they come to you, and you're paying for the drive time as well. Meanwhile, the pilots all ***** that they're too expensive. My IH dealer has a mechanic who was apprenticing in the aforementioned pt 145 shop, but quit when he found out how much more money he could make working on tractors.

Working on my 540 has been interesting too. I just spent $1500 on a new set of rod bolts. Exhaust valves were $300/ea. G&N's bill was a bit over 10K to clean and inspect all the internals and overhaul the cylinders. 7k was parts. They aren't getting rich off that. Now, had I just dropped off the engine and said "overhaul it", I think they would've made somewhere around $25K, but I'm going to have close to 500 hours of my labor in it counting research, part ordering, etc. So that's $50 an hour. Cut the hours in half for someone who knows what they're doing, and you back at $100/hr. Then overhead, insurance, etc. etc.... I'm not sure overhauls are overpriced. The parts are...which is mostly due to the fact that it's so hard to 1) get a PMA and 2) carry enough insurance to not go bankrupt the first time an engine containing your parts gets run out of fuel and you invariably get sued.
 
Another factor that may enter into the equation is the ongoing urbanization of America. I live in a rural state where our total population has changed little in the past 100 years, but whose cities have grown exponentially and whose small towns, outside of oil country, have steadily declined. Farms are getting bigger and both farm kids and retiring farmers are moving to the cities. I doubt we are unique.

With more people living close to a commercial service airport, fewer people see a benefit in flying themselves for travel. And almost nobody gets started in GA without at least some dream of traveling. Even the people who just make laps in the pattern and occasionally go for a $100 hamburger probably didn’t start their training with that as the sole end goal.

I’m an exception that proves the rule. I keep moving more rural and using my own plane for travel more, with a dream of upgrading to something pressurized. Even without filling the seats, I can compete with airlines on time and (marginal) cost. Having to leave the day before a trip in case roads are bad and stay in a hotel to catch a 5 a.m. flight that’s necessitated by connecting flights, having to leave my dogs at the boarding kennel, and other things all add up in dollars, hours, and anti-enjoyment. If I could take a $10 and reliably 30-minute Uber to the airline terminal, I’m sure the plane would fly a lot less.
 
AKiss20 said:
Maybe the leveling off of real wages as compared to productivity, the rapid growth of income and wealth inequality pushing down the purchasing power of the middle class, and the exploding cost of healthcare, education, and housing leaving nothing to spend on expensive hobbies like GA?
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Nah …. There is no leveling off or any particular trend adjustment at all ..
 

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Warmi said:
Nah …. There is no leveling off or any particular trend adjustment at all ..
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Notice how I said “relative to productivity”? Wages and productivity tracked each other very well in the post war period until the mid-70s when real wages leveled off while productivity continued to grow. Your own chart shows that real wages outside the top 5% have barely moved.

www.epi.org

Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts

Our country has suffered from rising income inequality and chronically slow growth in the living standards of low- and moderate-income Americans. This disappointing living-standards growth—which was in fact caused by rising income inequality—preceded the Great Recession and continues to this...
www.epi.org www.epi.org

www.pewresearch.org

For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades

Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
www.pewresearch.org www.pewresearch.org
 
Another facet to the decline in recreational aviation that is not discussed much is the shift in private owner demographics from 1985 to 1995. That shift brought fractional ownership to the table which basically removed the top 35-40% of those “golden age” private owners and weakened the overall recreational market strength and numbers.

I saw the same shift in my side business customer base. Unfortunately, by the time the recreational market was “reborn” again, Fractional owners were well established, Flight Unlimited and MS Flight Simulator allowed people to “fly” at home, and several incentives meant to jump start recreational ownership all aided in the market’s slide down the preverbal slippery slope. Throw in some Economics 101 and here we are today.
 
There are also about 20 000 experimental home build planes flying around so some part of the original GA market shifted from certified to experimental …
 
iamtheari said:
Another factor that may enter into the equation is the ongoing urbanization of America.
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That urbanization also includes the loss of smaller airports in the expanded urban area. That makes it more inconvenient to either base a plane, more competitive/inconvenient to rent a plane, and more challenging flight conditions with more challenging airspace and traffic, thus less enjoyable. These and the other factors raised above all contribute to the decline.
 
AKiss20 said:
Notice how I said “relative to productivity”? Wages and productivity tracked each other very well in the post war period until the mid-70s when real wages leveled off while productivity continued to grow. Your own chart shows that real wages outside the top 5% have barely moved.

www.epi.org

Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts

Our country has suffered from rising income inequality and chronically slow growth in the living standards of low- and moderate-income Americans. This disappointing living-standards growth—which was in fact caused by rising income inequality—preceded the Great Recession and continues to this...
www.epi.org www.epi.org

www.pewresearch.org

For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades

Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
www.pewresearch.org www.pewresearch.org
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That may be true but one of their reasons for stagnation is listed CEO pay growth which does not sound right just looking at basic numbers. Even if a CEO makes now 300 times what a typical worker makes ( vs 30 back in the 70s ) it is still a statistical noise in a corporation numbering 10s of thousands of employees - there must be other structural reasons for the stagnation …
 
I think the legal liabilities are one of the core problems. It stifles innovation and risk taking. I don't know what the right answer is but if liability was capped, I'd expect that we'd see more transfer of technology from auto engine manufacturers into aviation.

Honda went from being just an engine manufacturer to making products that use their engines. You see them in cars, atvs, personal water craft, boats, lawn tools, formula 1 racing, riding mowers, generators ... the list goes on and on. But what I can't find is a Honda engine to use in my experimental aircraft.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Roughly 117 people per day are killed on our nation's roads, and yet people hop in their cars without a second thought.
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You may want to look at the rates of death. From what I can see, the rate of death for light GA flying is a lot closer to riding a motorcycle than driving in a car.
 
elvisAteMySandwich said:
I'd expect that we'd see more transfer of technology from auto engine manufacturers into aviation.
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Except that train left the station years ago after the AGATE program. While at the time Honda was mainly into jets and turbofan engines, Toyota was developing a 4-place piston aircraft and engine alongside Cirrus and Columbia. Even Porche and Hyundai engine had offerings at the time. However, lack of a market or poor performance shutdown all those ventures except the Honda Jet and Cirrus. Regardless, not all has been lost to get the major international car OEMs involved back into small GA. If you dig a little, you'll find Toyota, Hyundai, Honda and others have been spending major money on large scale aviation ventures just not on Part 91 recreational aircraft market.

elvisAteMySandwich said:
But what I can't find is a Honda engine to use in my experimental aircraft.
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https://www.vikingaircraftengines.com/engine-options
 
elvisAteMySandwich said:
I think the legal liabilities are one of the core problems. It stifles innovation and risk taking. I don't know what the right answer is but if liability was capped, I'd expect that we'd see more transfer of technology from auto engine manufacturers into aviation.

Honda went from being just an engine manufacturer to making products that use their engines. You see them in cars, atvs, personal water craft, boats, lawn tools, formula 1 racing, riding mowers, generators ... the list goes on and on. But what I can't find is a Honda engine to use in my experimental aircraft.
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I don't know if that's the best example, because if you had a couple of million dollars of disposable income, you could buy a Honda Jet. Doesn't seem like they've been discouraged by legal liabilities...but they've recognized that they need to sell to where the money has gone. The top of the income distribution
 
Warmi said:
Nah …. There is no leveling off or any particular trend adjustment at all ..
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Wow. Looks like both the dot-com bust and the great recession were very good to the top 1%. I had thought they did better during Covid, but maybe that was only the Amazon investors.

Racerx said:
Mosaic....

I'm skeptical that does anything as the original LSA approval was nothing more than a blip
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I think the main problem with LSA is the aircraft. There are some really good, fun LSAs... But there were also some truly terrible ones. Couple that with aviation's automatic disdain for anything new, plus the Mosaic rumors that have been going for years now, plus the economic troubles that got Piper and Cirrus out of the LSA market, plus Cessna's failure to make the Skycatcher light enough to be worthwhile... The LSA market just had a lot working against it from the beginning, when it could have done quite well if the timing were different.

The other thing is just the speed issue. Like someone else in this thread mentioned, probably everyone who wants to get into aviation wants to travel at some point. Being VFR only with the LSA speed restriction, LSA just isn't where most pilots want to be. Most pilots want to be in the "hey this is actually practical for travel" category, which is why Cirrus, Bonanza, Mooney, and the like are so popular.
Doc Holliday said:
Even if a magic wand was waived and tomorrow all prices and expenses were half of today, you would still have people complaining "it's too expensive".
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At one point, my old flying club had a bit of an identity crisis, and a small faction of people said "Let's just get a dirt cheap airplane that's cheap to fly and keep things cheap. Cheap cheap cheap." After the annual meeting where this discussion happened, the long-time former treasurer of the club (I was the treasurer at the time) came up to me and said, "Don't do that. We tried that. Those same guys that want the cheap plane are too cheap to fly no matter how cheap it is, so your cheap airplane will sit in the hangar and rot." And looking at who had been saying it, I knew he was right.

We ended up going for the high end instead, turned over the entire fleet, and it has been massively successful for the club. The whole fleet has nice glass panels now, all the planes have nice paint and interior, all the loans are paid off and their financial condition is admirable. It's a GREAT club. And the club that used to look like us but still flies older, cheaper planes? They're still around, but surviving and not thriving.
FormerHangie said:
You may want to look at the rates of death. From what I can see, the rate of death for light GA flying is a lot closer to riding a motorcycle than driving in a car.
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Correct... But nobody ever seems to think about death when they get in a car. Nobody gets into my car and says "Is driving safe?"
Ed Haywood said:
During WWII, the US trained 435,000 pilots. By 1985, all those pilots were over 60.
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But right now we have roughly 600,000 pilots... So that can't be the only reason.
 
My opinion....

1- Ambulance chasing lawyers going after engine, prop & Aircraft manufactures for big money, when the real cause of many accidents are an under trained/hotshot pilot or incompetent mechanic. Or are just a straight-up-accident. Those big lawsuits lead to high payouts from these companies out of court which drives up prices via liability. Cessna, Continental, Hartzell and your Insurance Company need to factor in the cost of you not staying current and lawn darting your 414 into a orphanage, because, via the "Lawyas", it's their fault you're a buffoon....

Millions of $$ in payouts means your insurance, next set of cylinder heads and next prop go up in price so they can recoup their BS losses in/out of the courts

2- Good ol' Greed....
 
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Bell206 said:

What is a Viking Engine? — Viking Aircraft Engines

www.vikingaircraftengines.com www.vikingaircraftengines.com
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Friends don't let friends buy engines from that guy.
A friend made the mistake of buying one of his Subaru conversions years ago. Still hasn't sorted it out completely. Issues with the reduction gearbox, engine overheating all the time, promises for fixes but no actual results. And his personal attacks on other forums against other engine "makers", plus the way he badmouths anyone who says something critical of his "engine pulled from a wrecked car" conversion makes me not want to give him the time of the day, let alone a stack of Benjamins.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Roughly 117 people per day are killed on our nation's roads, and yet people hop in their cars without a second thought.
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And yet most ppl don’t fly a plane to pickup the kids from practice and get groceries. No one ever has to fly. Life in most of this country is rough without personal transportation.
 
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