From the high of 300,000 pilots in 1980 a steady 10,000 pilot decline in GA a year, and the FAA takes credit for the record low fatal Accident rate?
Accident rate, as in fatalities per 100,000 hours, not total fatalities
Not really. While most people can't afford new airplanes, they're still being bought and built en masse. Cirri are bought by consumers new, Cessna are bought by large flight schools and government agencies and Pipers are bought en masse by flight schools. Plenty of new airframes being introduced that in 10-20 years will be affordable to us peasants.
As far as pilot #'s well... time will tell.
GAMA Annual Report is
here.
Look at the section titled "U.S.-Manufactured General Aviation Airplane Shipments by Type" in section 1.5. Single engine airplane manufacture fell off the shelf in 1981, and has never recovered. In 1977 and 1978 more than 14,000 singles were produced each year in the U. S. Last year it was 745. Cirrus built 345 airplanes, Piper built 90 singles , 18 twins, and 47 turbines. Cessna built 129 Skyhawks, 46 Skylanes, 40 Stationaires, and 26 TTXs. Those aren't healthy numbers.
Same reason less people hunt, camp, shoot, build forts in the woods as kids, etc.
Less freedoms and less critical thinking being encouraged for kids.
I'm not sure what critical thinking has to do with those activities, it has more to do with opportunity and desire. When I was a kid and we lived out in the country, we used to shoot frequently, once we moved back to the city we stopped, because there was nowhere to shoot.
There is no reason to do most of the things I as a kid did 40 years ago. We did not have video games, 300 channels on TV, an iphone that they can't set down and many other things that keep kids from enjoying the things I did.
I built model airplanes, rode my bike, etc. and would give my left nut to go to the airport and get a ride. Hell even just watch planes take off and land.
Granted flying planes are more expensive now, but hell an Iphone is a grand, kids just aren't motivated to learn to fly to many other "easier" activities to participate in.
Most of the things you and I did as kids, today's children don't think of doing because it's not of their generation, just like I didn't do the same things my father did.
Looking at the age distribution chart, I don't see where it shows that the pilot population is declining. There are more pilots between 20-30 years old than between 50-60 years
old
Look at just the numbers for private and sport pilots. People under 30 make up most of the student starts. The number I have been watching for the last five years or so is the number of new original private certificates issued, and it's been hanging around 17.000 for most of the decade. (It's in Table 17 of the US Civil Airmen Statistics.) Now go back to that number of student pilots, which is approaching 150,000. What are they all doing? My only conclusion is that most have stopped training but their medicals have not expired yet. I'd guess maybe 40,000 of those nearly 150,000 are actively training. It looks like a lot of people under 30 are flying, but once you remove the inactive students, the number is much less impressive. There is an uptick in activity in the 20-24 age group, which I suspect is being driven by pilots undergoing career training, but there's no data for that.
I've been on automotive message boards since before Mosaic. As an amateur racer, I've always marveled that people will spend ~$100K modifying their street car for speed, handling and bling, (unsafe/unusable on the street) when for a fraction of that money, they could buy a formula Ford and go racing with SCCA. While a new Cirrus might be $1M, you could spend less than the cost of a Boxster on a very nice airworthy plane with money to spare for contemporary avionics. The cost of flying has certainly outpaced average wage increase, but in absolute terms I'll bet the cohort of potential aviators with adequate budget and free time is larger than it was in 1970. I think more than anything there is a lack of vision for flying. As flawed as the Icon project may be, seems like the industry needs more out-of-the-box approaches to re-ignite the romance of GA.
I think there are a lot of guys who like the idea of going fast, but aren't too jazzed by the effort and discipline that it takes to go racing. Plus, anyone who has their ego invested in how fast they think they are, isn't going to like the wake up call they'll get when they first show up at the track and find out that they are many seconds off the pace.
I got my private in 1978, and was around for the boom times. Back then, flying was expensive and hangars were hard to come by. Now, flying is expensive, the airplanes are the same ones I flew in back then, and hangars are very hard to come by in many areas. The things that have really outpaced inflation are housing, education, and healthcare. Add to that how much more education someone starting out today has to have just to get an entry level career type job, and young people don't have a lot of money to spend. To make things worse, employers have been able to force down wages for entry level positions significantly since the Great Recession, and the wage levels are just now barely starting to inch up. We just last year got real median household income up to the level it was in 1999, which was the previous peak.
We need as many private/membership only flying clubs as we have flight training schools. Flying is like a 2 edge sword. You have to fly often to stay current and with the way the cost have been, there are lots of GA pilots with dormant licenses
That's of the drawbacks of flying. It takes a big commitment to get started, and a big commitment to continue. It's not like going boating or something that it's very easy to maintain proficiency, you have to keep at it or it stops being fun and starts being scary. Going back to Table 17, there were more that 38,000 student certificates issued but few than 18,000 privates. What happened to the other 20,000? Undoubtedly some ran out of money, but lots others decided it wasn't for them.
There are a couple of trends that make the future of GA a little iffy. There is a tendency for the better paying jobs, those that pay well enough to support a flying habit, to be concentrated in the cities, where airport space is at a premium and is expensive. Also, the training fleet is ancient. When I started in 1977, the airplanes I flew were only a couple of year old. Now, they're much older than many of the pilots that fly them. If I'd gone out to the airport and was told I was going to learn in a Luscombe with no radios, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gone back. Technologically, that's what we're offering our new pilots, really old technology in really old airframes. I've said this before, but it bears repeating, if we have to keep flying the same airframes from the production boom of the late 60's and late 70's, then GA is going to fade out. At some point we must have some new airplanes.
The other problem is what are people going to use the airplane to do? As we've seen, pilots who only fly locally tend not to fly many hours, and I suspect tend to drop out as well. If you're wanting to use the airplane to go somewhere, now you need to be in some sort of ownership situation, maybe a club or a partnership. If you're going to stay overnight, you have to add that expense to your budget. Are you going by yourself, or taking a spouse, or an entire family? Now you need more airplane and a bigger travel budget, so the pool of prospective pilots who can afford that shrinks further.
and it was too expensive
