Your approach has been one to shore up salvage resources in order to extend its life on an individual serial number basis; that's frankly commendable. But as you highlight, it's an outlier approach in the aggregate. And just like the non-starter premise of building as a litmus test for access to EAB savings (given the low volume and markup on the resale side of 4+ seaters), it doesn't ultimately motivate the collective of pedestrians to enter the hobby imho...
In this game we are both picking our niche and trying to play the hand we are dealt as best we can.
For quite some years now I have been fascinated with the macro economics of what is going on in aviation, across the whole spectrum. I serve as a volunteer on the Board of a non-profit flying club that has a 15-airplane training fleet (12 x 172, 2 x Seneca II, 1 x Citabria). My kid brother is a former MD Hornet military pilot and now flies (well, used to fly) B787s. It's a really interesting time to say the least.
Facilitation, both regulatory, and economic (via serviceable fleet size), will be critical for the most cursory survival of the hobby going forward. Especially in post corona where the airlines are about to chew up and spit out another generation of
pork cycle losers who were never interested in dabbling in puddle jumper ownership absent a six figure turbine job at the end of it. Meaning, flight training pass-thrus won't be of help in shoring up landing counts across the country.
Recreational light GA has been in a secular decline since the late 1980s. Both the population of private pilots and the output of planes targeting that cohort is steadily shrinking. Companies such as Cirrus and Daher-Socata correctly read the market shift and maintained/grew revenues from this segment by moving upscale - expensive, top-end, technology-packed piston & turboprop airplanes and even a personal jet. They sell far fewer airplanes than they did more than a decade ago, but the ones they do sell are higher margin luxury baubles for the high disposable income hordes.
Companies such as Diamond, without the deep-pocket development capital available to Cirrus and Daher are doing their best trying to emulate the same strategy. But they are closer to the margins of this business, and precarious every time there's an economic downturn as a consequence.
Companies with legacy products such as Mooney and the Textron-Beechcraft piston airplanes passed their best-before dates before the first iPhone was introduced. Just like GM tried to upscale a Chevy Cavalier and pass it off as a Cadillac (Cimarron), a G1000 "Garminized" 1940s or '50s vintage airframe seems a bad idea. Clearly they can't compete with Cirrus in a luxury product market no matter how much historical "romance" those manufacturers try to wrap around their product offering. I will be surprised if any of those planes, including the Bonanza and Baron, emerge from the ashes of this current economic downturn.
The demand from commercial students wishing to make a career in aviation to supply the soon-to-be lamented "pilot shortage" breathed a bit of life into the training academies and flight schools, as well as giving a cyclical lift to the production of basic Cessnas and Pipers for that market. Like so many other things that are in oversupply (oil, cement, steel, downtown office space, automotive assembly capacity, commercial airplanes...) the flight training segment of the global economy is probably going to have to consolidate and shrink capacity as well.
I agree with you...how to rekindle passion in recreational aviation and resurrect this pastime to at least allow this hobby to survive will be a serious challenge in this changing world.
