Pessimist view of GA

First off, at 26 I think I count as a Millennial. I started training for my PPL at 23, and I worked my ass off to afford flying lessons. I got my cert at 24 and I love spending time out at the airport. My flight instructor was a professional pilot for an airliner, and was fairly young as well. Every time we talked he would tell me about how busy he was with new students. I'm sure GA isn't what it use to be, but it's not going to be completely dead in 20 years...... There are still plenty of us that love GA. It's just hard to afford it when your right out of high school or college.

Secondly, WWII and Vietnam vets were and some still are a big supporter of GA. If you claim you haven't encountered these guys during your training, then you haven't been hanging out in the right airports. I have had a TON of help from various old school pilots since I bought my Grumman a few months ago. Over the last few months, I have received a LOT of support in the form of advice, flight training (converting from a Cessna to a Grumman), and help with a lot of repairs that came along with my new ownership of a plane that was built 16 years before I was even born. I am eternally grateful for all of it. GA to me is a group unlike any other.
 
Dav8or said:
No, they've figured it out. They sadly believe that they will just never retire and that they will always be somehow employable.
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Actually it works in many industries. Not IT so much or manual labor where the brain and/or body won't keep up forever. But many are middle managers now and the normal cycle will continue. There will be a LOT of openings left sitting vacant when boomers retire for upper middle and director level things that need to be done. GenX in their 50s and early 60s will have to fill a lot of shoes. Yeah, it's a dangerous thing to think they'll do it WELL but any boomer ever panning to retire had best be finding a GenXer to mentor now... And teach them what they want done with "their" company or department because they'll drop dead of a heart attack if they keep working into their 70s and next in line will pick up poorly or very well depending on how well they were taught.



Dav8or said:
The Millenials are the death of our country as we have known it. They are the final piece required for Huxley's 1984 to come true. A whole generation yearning to embrace socialism and eventually communism with open arms. So be it. Not much I can do about it. Thanks helicopter moms of America! :mad: (not mean any moms out there that actually fly helicopters, but rather the overbearing, controlling moms so common today ;)) You have created the ultimate dependents.
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GenX is raising the helicopter kids. Millenials are very self reliant but don't have the values their parents and grandparents did. They were locked out of the beginning process of "The American Dream" for too long by a poor economy, so they defined what they want out of life themselves. My sister hammered out a Masters in her chosen field and waited until her 30s to get hired. She now does her job but isn't invested in it so to speak, she had a decade to decide other things in life were more important to her than some puritanical work ethic toward her "career". She doesn't want socialism much to the chagrin of those who don't understand her, she simply isn't interested in wasting time at a company waiting on someone to notice her, she just works on outside projects in her field for free and gets herself noticed. She even did a government stint and her boss told her to leave. Not because she was doing a bad job, but the opposite: You won't get a promotion here for ten years. There's people who don't do this job as well as you do but they have seniority and they'll always be ahead of you. Get out now and move to the private sector and make a name for yourself. You'll be miles ahead of them at retirement.

Phoenix said:
Dude everything we have, you boomtards made. If the Millenials actually voted boomtards and their policies would be sailing icebergs.
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This is commonly stated but frankly, you know you don't want the stuff they created anyway, right? They want it all to go on forever and you're off building something completely different. I'd say go do it. Forget about any "boomtards" business that they haven't done a proper plan for handoff and mentoring of younger staff and let it die. The market will fill in the gravesite. Build your own legacy and ignore anyone who wants you to wait around for them to hand you theirs.

Sundancer said:
I wish we could hire one that was IT literate - great with social media, but useless with back office tools, and critical reading and analysis, too.

Some of the ones that went to community college first have some skills; the rest require "remedial" Excel, Access, Word, etc. . .

maybe one of 'em will figure out the next-great-thing though, like developing software that doesn't suck. . .
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This is an industry problem in IT. Companies taught people how to use "those new computers" 20-30 years ago. Then companies one day decided that people were born knowing complex tools like word, or worse, excel, or that people could just "pick it up on their own". Some can. Most can't. Handing a complex power tool to someone in a machine shop without that person having any real experience or training on it? Never happen. They'll hurt themselves.

Companies every day hire people off the street and point them at a pile of complex tools on computers and wave their hands and say, "basic computer skills, basic computer skills" knowing full well no school in the nation teaches how to analyze a fifteen tab spreadsheet with a pivot table anywhere other than MBA classes. It's beyond stupid. And companies think "IT" people can solve this problem. IT people have been saying for two decades that putting a PC on the desk of someone who can't figure out that the CD drive isn't a drink holder, is stupid. We've even culturally made it common to make fun of that. We aren't trainers and we aren't able to show the average person how to use software to accomplish their job.

All we can do is repair the damage they cause by not understanding the machine sitting in front of them ("Please stop clicking on pop up ads and things in your email you don't know what they are and 'yes' to every box that pops up, please!") and keep the server protected from a majority of workers who have absolutely no idea what they're doing sitting at a modern PC.

Companies that completely lock down PCs to the point where they're dumb terminals and then teach the skillset required to use te dumb terminal first, only opening up other tools as the person gains skill, do way better at meeting their business goals. Call centers for example. That script on the screen may not be right, and it may not be good customer service, but it's a standard that everyone answering that phone and sitting at that desk knows they can accomplish. Then you build on that.

Giving people a PC with no training is like handing them an AK-47 and telling them you'd like one hole punched in a piece of paper at 100 yards. They're going to shoot someone else, themselves, jam the machine, break the machine, throw up their hands in frustration, whatever... The outcome is likely to be really poor.
 
I might diasgree on the complexity of back office tools - a weekend with Execl and a copy of "Excel for Dummies" should pretty much get an undergrad up to speed on the basics, plus a bit. Same-same for Word, Access, etc. PowerPoint and Visio are not quantum mechanics.

Not talking about call center zombies here - just new grads with skills too weak for the entry level professional positions they walk into. Not painting them all with the same brush, and plenty exceptions exist. But not enough. . .

I see bunches not prepared, by their curriculum or their personal initiative.
 
FastEddieB said:
For me...

Cessna Pilot Center at Opa Locka, FL. 1975. $995 guaranteed Private Pilot.

I was not a quick study, but got it in a reasonable amount of hours, IIRC
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So I guess we can say that a PPL has quadrupled in cost since about 1975?
 
Sundancer said:
I might diasgree on the complexity of back office tools - a weekend with Execl and a copy of "Excel for Dummies" should pretty much get an undergrad up to speed on the basics, plus a bit. Same-same for Word, Access, etc. PowerPoint and Visio are not quantum mechanics.



Not talking about call center zombies here - just new grads with skills too weak for the entry level professional positions they walk into. Not painting them all with the same brush, and plenty exceptions exist. But not enough. . .



I see bunches not prepared, by their curriculum or their personal initiative.
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I'm certainly a fan of personal initiative, since it's how I taught myself most of my skillset for my career.

What I was saying is that excel didn't exist when I started working in the field. When it came out, companies held training courses and taught folks what they wanted them to know, or they sent them off site to learn it.

If companies both know it's not in anyone's curriculum and they also don't specifically list it as a skill needed in the job posting, which is usually what companies do these days, and ASSUME the person will magically show up knowing how to use ANY piece of software, then the company is setting folks like yourself up to be "disappointed" in applicants.

I've worked for places that spent the effort to figure out exactly what tasks they wanted specific job roles doing (often led by former military leadership) and they provided the training time, trainers, and resources to make sure everyone was at a base level of those tasks before they tossed them into the job. That company is VERY rare.

Most just let staff flounder along and figure it out on their own, which when you look at a computer as a tool and not a "PeeCee" meant to sit on the desk and entertain someone at home, is a silly way to wield a tool.

I can show you things Visio can do that 99% of people using it don't know it can do. I needed those things for my job role. But nobody taught me. Expecting anyone to sit down and "figure out" Visio even to the 25-50% knowledge level these days is ridiculous. It's a massive tool with huge abilities and I guarantee that's not exactly a "user friendly" interface to sit down to if you haven't been using it since it was a LOT dumber program.

Access? Nobody who pays even the slightest bit of attention in ANY CS class uses Access for anything. Access is a guaranteed way to paint yourself into a corner you can't get out of, when you needed a proper RDBMS. It doesn't and hasn't ever, scaled beyond a single user, *properly*. It should have died a quick and painless death a long time ago if it weren't for MSFT *still* using the file format under the hood in their servers. It needed to be nuked from orbit decades ago.

*You* and *I* may find poking at a piece of software for hours to get it to do tasks, interesting, but I guarantee a majority do not. They want to learn by rote and do their data entry task and go home and have a life. The software is often more in their way than a strategic tech gain for the company, especially if the company didn't make sure they know how to do the specific tasks they need to know in that software.

They don't want to know or understand how the computer works. They want to know what button to push on it to get a food pellet.

"Grad" means nothing. I can go be a "grad" and only ever touch a computer to enter my term papers into Word. If you hire that "grad" they won't know what you want them to do with Excel or Visio or any piece of software. They'll have opened each of those things and maybe done a few papers in Word and made a little table in Excel and that's it. That "qualifies" as "Microsoft Office familiarity" on a resume. Unless... the company tests to see where applicants really are and then trains from there (or refuses to hire and moves to the next applicant).

It's really bad in IT resumes. We've had applicant after applicant list technologies on their resumes who can't tell you where the configuration file is for that technology, let alone how to set it up in anywhere close to our environment or even a story of setting it up elsewhere.

My favorite are things like Jenkins. If they ever went to the Jenkins web page at their old employer and clicked on "Build" they list Jenkins experience. But they can't install Jenkins or make it do anything.

"SQL" is another one. Ask them what an outer join is or does and they glaze over instantly. But everyone in IT lists "SQL" as something they know.

It's not because they intend to be disingenuous about their skillset. They actually think if they ran someone else's SQL scripts that they've "worked with SQL".

So just like those examples, if you want to know what someone knows about Excel, you have to ask during interviews and ask real questions. Otherwise you "bought" a resource that can't do what you needed them to do.
 
txflyer said:
So I guess we can say that a PPL has quadrupled in cost since about 1975?
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Anyway back to airplanes...

So what's inflation between then and now?

(Not that we haven't already had that discussion a million times before. Haha.)
 
Yes, airplanes - though Access as a front end to MS SQL Server is useful -

Anyway, an acquaintance bought a used CAP 172, and cut a deal with a young starving CFII, went through PP and IR, and used it as a time bulider. He thinks he cut his training costs quite a bit, and sold the airplane about break even. No hard numbers or deep dive analysis, just that it worked out for him, in his opinion, paying something like $85 per tach hour to himself fir the airplane, vs FBO rental.

The risk, of course, is hitting a big maintenance item early on. . .
 
denverpilot said:
Access? Nobody who pays even the slightest bit of attention in ANY CS class uses Access for anything. Access is a guaranteed way to paint yourself into a corner you can't get out of, when you needed a proper RDBMS. It doesn't and hasn't ever, scaled beyond a single user, *properly*. It should have died a quick and painless death a long time ago if it weren't for MSFT *still* using the file format under the hood in their servers. It needed to be nuked from orbit decades ago.
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Yes!

In one of my many previous lives, I dabbled in database development. As such, I became an idiot savant with Paradox. Man, I could make that program sing. Whatever you wanted to do, Paradox could do it. I became quite popular in the rarified world of newspaper distributors who, by and large, were still doing things with grease pencils on plastic sheets.

I was able to with a single button click what two or three part time assistants were doing. The money saved across the board was impressive.

Then, Access was packaged with Office, and it started to become the database program of choice. God, what a POS that program was! I struggled for hours to get it to do what I could do with Paradox in a few seconds.

Luckily, the world quickly moved out of the stage where an amateur programmer could make a difference, and I reverted to more normal business activities. And Paradox died.
 
For me, I suck at computer programming. My twin brother and I took a beginners computer science course in high school using Visual Basic. I was horrible at that and got a bad grade while my brother got the hang of it and went on to learn other programming languages such as Java, Python, and maybe C++. He uses computer programming in his engineering work. I think the reason why I am bad at programming is because I don't have the logical or analytical capability that is required in programming when you have to fix problems that happen when a line of code doesn't work. I am still a little bit interested in programming at times.

I know how to use Word, PowerPoint, and have a basic knowledge of Excel. Microsoft Access I never really used that program before and I don't really know how to use it. However my father showed me on one night what I could do with it.
 
N918KT said:
For me, I suck at computer programming. My twin brother and I took a beginners computer science course in high school using Visual Basic. I was horrible at that and got a bad grade while my brother got the hang of it and went on to learn other programming languages such as Java, Python, and maybe C++. He uses computer programming in his engineering work. I think the reason why I am bad at programming is because I don't have the logical or analytical capability that is required in programming when you have to fix problems that happen when a line of code doesn't work. I am still a little bit interested in programming at times.

I know how to use Word, PowerPoint, and have a basic knowledge of Excel. Microsoft Access I never really used that program before and I don't really know how to use it. However my father showed me on one night what I could do with it.
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Some people just get programming, others don't. I've known some very bright people who couldn't program even though they wanted to, and some who could be good programmers but couldn't stand to do it.

Middle schoolers are reasonably proficient in Word and Powerpoint these days. I don't think they much use Excel until high school.
 
txflyer said:
So I guess we can say that a PPL has quadrupled in cost since about 1975?
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I'd say even more than that and out pacing inflation as well. Got my PPL in 1994 at 3K. $42/hr on a C150 and $15/hr for a CFI.
 
Likely income has more than kept pace? More than quadrupled, I mean?
 
Most calculators say $1000 in 1975 buys you about $4500 worth of stuff today. So 4x the price isn't that bad if your salary kept up with inflation.
 
The big downturn in GA was not obvious to me in Alaska, where where I have been flying the past 35 years. More airplanes and GA activity every year, more or less tracking the increase in general population. I guess that's because there is no viable alternative for accessing 90% of the state. That, and AK tourism has exploded in the past 30 years which drives the flightseeing and fly-in tourist market.

Just recently, we moved to a small town in the southwest lower 48. The lack of GA activity is striking. You might go all day and not see a piston single fly over; I am, however, doing what I can to increase the number of local flight operations. :)

I agree with many of the comments- increased govt regs, routine, inexpensive access to air travel, the increasing desire for "more security"/"less risk" by the population, are tending to strangle GA. Since 9/11, I have had several friends who know I'm a pilot ask questions like: "So you can just get in your airplane whenever you want and fly anywhere you want? Who's monitoring that? What keeps you from crashing into a building or bridge?".... and so on
 
edo2000 said:
. Since 9/11, I have had several friends who know I'm a pilot ask questions like: "So you can just get in your airplane whenever you want and fly anywhere you want? Who's monitoring that? What keeps you from crashing into a building or bridge?".... and so on
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You didn't file a flight plan??!!
 
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