Who do you blame for GA downfall.

brien23

brien23

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Who do you blame for GA downfall, parts price, insurance cost, FBO surcharge, manufacture price, maintenance, FAA. Are we headed to a Europe style GA with the cost, "Pay to fly".
 
Anthem said:
liability with lawsuits - basically tort.
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This. Anything less than airline safety figures and your a bad manufacturer or sold to a manufacturer and are totally responsible for said persons injuries or death regardless.
 
Our bubble-wrap society is averse to any physical risk, so private flying is viewed as dangerous.

So the people instead get involved in extreme sports.
 
Liability is what drove the decline starting in the 80s. All the major manufacturers quit building GA after a series of lawsuits regarding old aircraft. It came back a little in the 90s thanks to caps on the liability, but the cap is still high, driving up cost to manufacture, which drives down the economics of scale, which further drives up the cost.

Just one example I know of in the last ten years, a pilot flew into a mountainside on a foggy day. His family sued Cessna and Lycoming alleging it was a mechanical failure that drove him into the mountain. I don't recall the final outcome of the case, but either way Cessna and Lycoming had to spend money defending themselves, and I'm guessing the family still received some type of settlement.

50 years ago the average middle income family could easily afford to own an aircraft. It can still be done today, but the aircraft has to be 50 years old, and other things probably sacrificed.
 
There are so many factors that have contributed. Liability has, but if the market were large enough manufacturers would find a way. Cost certainly has, but cost (whether airplanes, maintenance, training, fuel or insurance-which is liability repackaged) has been largely driven by the market size continuing to contract.

When I was young, mumbletey-mumble years ago, (OK, the 1960s/1970s), pilots and astronauts were cool. Their exploits were the stuff of news coverage, and they were much admired. In addition, there were many more around due, in part, to all the military trained pilots from WW2, the Korean war and the Vietnam war. (By percentage of the population, 1970 US population was 203,000,000 and there were 720,000 pilots, 303,000 private pilots vs. 2020 US population 331,000,000 with 691,700 pilots, 169,000 private pilots). The barrier to entry was much smaller and you or your family probably knew a pilot. Now I'm very unusual and a bit of a novelty because I am a pilot. Also, in my youth, if you asked people about pilots, they most likely thought of military pilots, now I think they're most likely thinking of airline pilots. (No science here, just my perception.)

In addition, air travel was still regulated and artificially kept expensive. Routes were fewer. So flying yourself somewhere given that 1) You were more likely to be a pilot (it's cool or you already were one), 2) Flying yourself was likely cost and schedule competitive, was much more accepted.

Which was the sole cause? None of these was sole cause. They all contributed. The real world is so much more complicated than we'd like.

John
Who spent large chunks of his career building computer models of real world phenomenon and realizes "It's complicated" (and I'm not Nauga)
 
No one. Aviation has always been expensive. I think the GA golden era was artificially inflated by a surplus of pilot demand created as a consequence of WWII. I argue that had the war not occurred we'd have never seen the growth in GA that happened after the war and it would never have reached a level where we have discussions about its decline.
 
Not just GA. I blame our culture of safetyism for the downfall of lots of good things, like having children. 50 years ago it was 2.5 kids per woman, now it’s 1.6—a rate at which the US would be depopulating if not for immigration. I blame carseats, I struggle getting my grandchildren into them, they are strapped in tighter than Ham the Space Chimp. Sure we want safety, but we seem to have lost a sense of reasonableness along the way, there is no appreciation for tradeoffs. Sure carseats are marginally ( arguably) safer, but how much and at what cost? I know my wife and I would not have had 5 kids if we had to deal with those seats, we would have stopped at 1.
 
Iflydogs said:
Not just GA. I blame our culture of safetyism for the downfall of lots of good things, like having children. 50 years ago it was 2.5 kids per woman, now it’s 1.6—a rate at which the US would be depopulating if not for immigration. I blame carseats, I struggle getting my grandchildren into them, they are strapped in tighter than Ham the Space Chimp. Sure we want safety, but we seem to have lost a sense of reasonableness along the way, there is no appreciation for tradeoffs. Sure carseats are marginally ( arguably) safer, but how much and at what cost? I know my wife and I would not have had 5 kids if we had to deal with those seats, we would have stopped at 1.
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Never been a first responder, eh?
 
Parts availability has to do with flying 60 year old airplanes. We're flying 60 year old airplanes because new planes are a super expensive. New planes are super expensive largely due to economies of scale, or lackthereof. We're not building as many planes because of commercial air travel and the interstate highway system.

So, I blame Eisenhower.
 
Point to Ponder: if there’s ~850K active pilots of all certificates and ~650K with a private or higher cert, what size should the GA fleet be? Average and median age of the fleet?

If you subtract out a percentage of the second class and first class medical holders who don’t participate in recreational GA, what does that fleet size need to look like if demand is nominal? What does the replacement rate need to be? How do partnerships impact fleet size?
 
Somewhere, in the past 18 months or so, I read that close to half the cost to build/sell a 172/182 was due to liability. Has anyone heard this and can supply factual data?
 
robin ardoin said:
Somewhere, in the past 18 months or so, I read that close to half the cost to build/sell a 172/182 was due to liability. Has anyone heard this and can supply factual data?
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That’s pretty much proprietary to each OEM, but from a raw materials standpoint, an RV-10 airframe kit runs $85K before paint, avionics and engine.

Add that and (generously) 500hrs (likely more) assembly labor at a fully loaded cost of $100/hr and you’re at $225K+. The Piper 100i fleet price is ~$285K.

So, the question is whether Piper’s liability cost is $140K/plane.
 
The truism that when I am ready to stop flying, I will first moan online endlessly about the death and demise of GA and kvetch openly about how much better it all used to be for a few years or decades on my way out.

"Go fly" is our version of "touch some grass" :P
 
I'm surprised that nobody's touched on the FAA's burdensome medical requirements and every minor perceived infraction or malady on their list of Need to Know items since the day you were born.

I'm not sure if the number of certificated pilots is measurably diminished vs the number of prospective pilots who have yet to encounter the medical labyrinth, but any regular visitor of this board would believe that it's likely a non-insignificant number.

Sport pilot was the intended solution to the above, at least for those with non-professional aspirations, but has proven itself to be only very slightly cheaper than Private and with much less availability to boot.
 
TCABM said:
That’s pretty much proprietary to each OEM, but from a raw materials standpoint, an RV-10 airframe kit runs $85K before paint, avionics and engine.

Add that and (generously) 500hrs (likely more) assembly labor at a fully loaded cost of $100/hr and you’re at $225K+. The Piper 100i fleet price is ~$285K.

So, the question is whether Piper’s liability cost is $140K/plane.
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Don't forget fixed cost of facilities, tooling, corporate overhead, etc. You captured that in fully loaded labor rates, but loaded rates are highly dependent on volume. That's where economies of scale come in. That's what is really killing companies like Cessna and Piper, or rather the lack of. That's also why Cirrus is able to compete effectively.
 
Helicopter parents raising fear adverse children combined with screen addiction and cheap simulators = very little new blood in the GA space. Heck they don't even care if they drive or not let alone fly.

There's no new market or businesses would invest. No point in investing in boomers / Gen-X
 
TCABM said:
If there’s anyone to ‘blame’, it’s cheap pilots expecting a niche mini-market to follow the economics of mass markets.
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^^This. While the 2000%+ increase in liability costs was an initial factor, the private GA market was already in a downward slide in the early 80s and the tort issues just gave the OEMs an easy out of those specific declining markets. And if it was only tort concerns then after GARA was passed the private GA market should have at least recovered half of its numbers since the OEMs no longer faced those liability issues on a large scale. But it didn’t come close.

Regardless, I’ve watched how my Part 91 mx customers had changed over the same time frame. Throw in a generational ownership shift, deregulation, and most importantly the digital age, and the youth that should have picked up the market in the 90s and onward, had found other avenues to pursue. Bottomline, people just didn’t have the want to fly as others did. And one look at how the drone market took off shows even the follow on generations have found their own new avenues to pursue when it comes to flight.

robin ardoin said:
Somewhere, in the past 18 months or so, I read that close to half the cost to build/sell a 172/182 was due to liability. Has anyone heard this and can supply factual data?
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If you dig into the data behind GARA, prior to the act the liability cost was between 65-75% per unit (aircraft). Once GARA passed, that cost has declined and the last time I read about it was around 25-30% per unit which I think is average. But keep in mind the other markets that make up GA never declined in a similar fashion during that same period and continue to grow today. Its only the private, recreational Part 91 market that has continued to decline.
 
Salty said:
Helicopter parents raising fear adverse children combined with screen addiction and cheap simulators = very little new blood in the GA space. Heck they don't even care if they drive or not let alone fly.

There's no new market or businesses would invest. No point in investing in boomers / Gen-X
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I'd say more than half of my prebuy/ferry/training work has been for 20-somethings in the last few years, from numerous walks of life (of course tech heavy where I am, but not as heavy as I'd have thought before moving here). I've had to check a few presumptions of my own when I rock up to meet a new owner and he's tattooed head to toe and looks like 21 year old darth maul. Then we chat and share aviation together and it's awesome.

There's still new blood and they're just as enthusiastic as the old blood used to be.

The airports all looking like supermax prisons isn't exactly the welcome mat. Bystanders still think this hobby is for insane people. I'm not sure they're wrong, then or now. :D
 
schmookeeg said:
Bystanders still think this hobby is for insane people. I'm not sure they're wrong, then or now. :D
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We have to be a little nuts! I know when I first met my wife, she only ever viewed airports from a commercial airline sense, and even flying in general was just a means of transportation. She had no idea there was this entire culture of people that go fly to just fly. One of our early dates I offered to take her flying, and she was wondering where we were going to go, what she needed to pack, etc.
 
Lots of good answers. I'll add the interstate highway system, the demise of the 55mph national speed limit, and fast, reliable, comfortable cars.

Why go to the trouble of flying a Skyhawk at 90 mph if you can drive your car at 85mph? When cars got really good, that removed a lot of the utility for the average Joe. The Cessna 150 was named the "Commuter" because they envisioned it as being cheap, fast transportation that one guy could fly back and forth rather than drive his Edsel that was probably broken down again.
 
schmookeeg said:
I'd say more than half of my prebuy/ferry/training work has been for 20-somethings in the last few years, from numerous walks of life (of course tech heavy where I am, but not as heavy as I'd have thought before moving here). I've had to check a few presumptions of my own when I rock up to meet a new owner and he's tattooed head to toe and looks like 21 year old darth maul. Then we chat and share aviation together and it's awesome.

There's still new blood and they're just as enthusiastic as the old blood used to be.

The airports all looking like supermax prisons isn't exactly the welcome mat. Bystanders still think this hobby is for insane people. I'm not sure they're wrong, then or now. :D
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Great post. At least once a week we get a college-aged kid wandering into our strip asking about lessons.
 
Jim K said:
Lots of good answers. I'll add the interstate highway system, the demise of the 55mph national speed limit, and fast, reliable, comfortable cars. Why go to the trouble of flying a Skyhawk at 90 mph if you can drive your car at 85mph?
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In all weather, with 100% internet access, and stop anytime you want for a bathroom break or a meal.

On the flip side, airline flights halfway across the country are 200 bucks.

The window where SEP GA is advantageous for travel is fairly narrow.
 
Ed Haywood said:
Great post. At least once a week we get a college-aged kid wandering into our strip asking about lessons.
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It does not help if those college aged kids become airline pilots, and never step foot into GA again.
 
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