Ok, but what about my new truck?
I'm gathering that you like to buy a used airplane for a price similar to what airplanes sold for a few years ago. Considering those airplanes are now that much older, that seems like a reasonable request. I'm also assuming you'd like to buy a new truck without that pesky additional dealer markup, or even get a little discount. Le's see if we can project which one is more likely to happen.
Edmunds, the car web site people, estimate that there will be 15.2 million new vehicles sold in the U.S. this year. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics tells us that there are 212.2 million licensed drivers in the U. S. That comes out to one new vehicle for every 14 drivers, not too shabby, and if that actually occurs, it will either make the vehicle fleet larger or newer, depending on scrappage.
Let's see what we can come up on the aviation front. GAMA tells us that in the first three quarters, there were 895 total piston aircraft shipments by GAMA members in the first nine months of 2021. If we add the same number of shipments as were in the third quarter again as an estimate for the fourth quarter, that's a total of 1295, but that's for the whole world. The U.S. typically gets about two thirds of those, also according to the GAMA, so that's 855 airplanes. That includes some, but not all, light sport aircraft. Flight Design,Tecnam, Icon, Pipistrel, and CubCrafters are included, so maybe another 50 or so light sport? So we're looking at 900 or so new airplanes for the U. S.
Now, let's try to figure out how many pilots there are. The 2021 airman statistics have been published by the FAA: Some of these counts are very straightforward but a few of them require some estimation. The easy ones are:
Recreational Pilot: 85
Sport Pilot: 6801
Private Pilot: 161,459
and I'm going to count all of them.
Student pilot is not obvious, because student certificates don't expire any more. There have been approximately 50,000 student certificates issued each of the last five years, so I'm going to go with last year's student certificate issuance, which was 50,874. Note that there were approximately 23,000 first time Private certificates earned last year, so more than half of the students don't finish their ticket.
Also not obvious is the number of Commercial and Airline Transport certificate holders that fly light GA. Some of them clearly only fly for work, but I don't know what the split would be, so I'm going to say all the commercial rated pilots should be included, and a third of the ATPs, so that's 104,610 commercial and about 54,000 ATPs. Add all that together, and that comes to 377,829 pilots, or 420 pilots for every new airplane added to the fleet. So, no help there, the fleet is most likely going to shrink this year.
What about E-ABs, you ask? Well our own
@wanttaja tells us
here that approximately 1000 new homebuilts are registered each year, but the E-AB fleet is staying put in the 28,000 range, so no help there either.
I know some of us are hoping that as the boomers age out, that a large number of airplanes will come on the market. Sorry to say it's not likely, as the age groups that covers the baby boom generation has shrunk by a quarter over the last five years, and the age groups that will replace them are not going to be that much smaller.
So, what you have is a fairly stable pilot population chasing what is by and large the same old legacy fleet. All transportation equipment eventually wears out or gets destroyed by weather, neglect, and accidents, and needs to be replaced. That's not happening, so
@Morgan3820 I don't see a less expensive airplane in you future. But a more reasonably priced truck later this year?
Doritos crystal ball say YES!
