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GA activity and its decline

I wonder how many pilots in @Peter’s numbers are in some sort of airline (i.e.professional career) training and how many are actual private pilots. After all, you start your flying career with a PPL, no matter what your ultimate goal is.

Last Edited by 172driver at 16 Jan 22:42

172driver wrote:

I wonder how many pilots in @Peter’s numbers are in some sort of airline (i.e.professional career) training and how many are actual private pilots. After all, you start your flying career with a PPL, no matter what your ultimate goal is.

Sure but no reason to think that the proportion of actual PPL vs stepping stone PPLs has changed.

EGTK Oxford

Mooney_Driver wrote:

But the main thing I can see here vividly is that PPR and the threat of losing one’s Homebase and having to drive hours to get to the airport massively reduces utility. More and more cities divest themselfs of their GA infrastructure and become GA deserts. Politicians in many places will do everything in their power to close airfields and turn them into housing estates or anything else they can profit of, many communities do not want airfields nearby out of NIMBY and other considerations.

Yes, this is very relevant. In federal Germany there are luckily still many provincial politicians who want their region/city to have an airport ), for reasons of prestige and because the local economy demands it. But we’re mainly talking about smaller international airports here or at least those that can take bizjets (Leer, Emden, Wilhelmshaven to name just three from my home region). A pure GA field with less than 1000 m of asphalt will indeed get little love from politicians…

Low-hours pilot
EDVM Hildesheim, Germany

In a document from NLF there are some numbers from the Norwegian GA fleet and GA pilots. The numbers are from (and up to) 2016. The reported numbers are “active” licenses (current medical, ratings etc) and airworthy aircraft.

The trend is downward IMO for all licences (this statistics does not including microlight).

There are other numbers of interest as well. For instance NLF is the organisation “everybody” is a member of. It has 18693 members where 6066 are member of aircraft activities (not paragliding etc). EAA has 250 members and AOPA 220 (in comparison ) Most, if not all EAA and AOPA members are also member of NLF.

The number of private (noncommercial and airworthy) aircraft in all categories:

The number of (active) licenses in all categories:

This is a bit interesting, because we can calculate the number of (active) pilots per aircraft. I bunch together LAPL and PPL.

  • PPL/LAPL: 2.6
  • PPL/LAPL(H): 0.86
  • Gliding: 3.6
  • Balloon: 0.32
  • Microlight: 3.1

This means there are fewer active licenses per airworthy “motor” aircraft than there are active microlight licenses per airworthy microlight aircraft. There are more airworthy helicopters than there are active licenses! and 3 times as many balloons as there are licenses!! Who would have thought? The thing with helicopters is most certainly that many of them are owned by pilots with CPL.

“Motor” aircraft in Norway include EASA planes, experimental planes and ICAO Annex 1 planes (all planes where PPL/LAPL is needed). But, I would never have imagined that PPL/LAPL had fewer licenses per aircraft than microlight. The reason must be that the total number of microlight aircraft is about 1200 (from other sources), but only about 1/4 of the fleet is airworthy at any given time apparently (for various reasons. It’s easy to purchase an aircraft, but much more work to maintain it and get it inspected each year). This probably also roughly reflect the number of active pilots vs the number of un-active pilots: about 1 to 4 and probably much less (in all categories I would think)

Each individual club in NLF report the number of hours flown. So the total number of hours is found. This number is probably roughly correct for microlight and gliding, but certainly way too small for “motor” as a whole, since only those aircraft operated by a club is included. They are all minimum numbers, and more minimum for “motor” than for microlight and gliders. Microlight is “run” by NLF, so in theory all activity is reported.

With this we can calculate the average hours flown per (airworthy) aircraft and per (active) license per year.

  • “Motor” aircraft: 39 h per year
  • Microlight aircraft: 46 h per year
  • Glider aircraft: 42 h per year
  • PPL/LAPL: 15.1 h per year
  • Microlight License: 14.9 h per year
  • Glider license: 11.3 h per year

At least in Norway they are fairly similar numbers. But again, surprising to me that each active PPL/LAPL pilot actually flies more per year than each active microlight pilot. One must also keep in mind that PPL/LAPL is way under reported compared with microlight. Gliding is fairly obvious, since each flight on average is fairly short.

The numbers for LAPL/PPL for 2017 and 2018 is about the same as for 2016. EASA is shaping up all the time and LSA aircraft are nice and plentiful.

I am actually more worried about microlight.

  • Only 1/4 of the fleet is airworthy at any given time
  • meaning the number of “active” pilots vs the number of “inactive” pilots is what? 1/10, 1/20 even less?
  • By experience the people “running the business” some 20 years ago when it expanded tremendously, are all getting too old to fly, and the inflow is way too small.
  • 600 kg limit, although nice in it’s own right, is something made by and for the “community” above, which is withering away (literally). It’s not made for the youth, like for instance gliding with a very strong community feeling and where EASA lowered the minimum age to 14 a couple of years ago.
  • Microlight aircraft getting too expensive (600 kg limit), licenses too complex. This will draw young people to gliding and paragliding, and old people to LAPL (experimental and LSA).
The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway
What happened in 2005 (sharp decline) and 2010 (sharp increase?) I would blame the economic crisis for decline in 2005, but as I remember the crisis was some years later, at least in estonia..
EETU, Estonia

“By experience the people “running the business” some 20 years ago when it expanded tremendously, are all getting too old to fly, ’
Or too heavy for the microlight?

Maoraigh
EGPE, United Kingdom

I am actually more worried about microlight.

I think it is human nature, exemplified by the phrase “easy come easy go”, that if an activity has a lower barrier to entry it will also have a lower barrier to exit. It follows that the UL community will be more vulnerable to “boom – bust” fluctuations than the more expensive to get into areas of GA.

Similarly, if an activity has experienced a rapid growth because of medical concessions (I am advised that in the UK most UL pilots fly on the NPPL, and thus mostly with the medical self declaration; I don’t know if Norway has anything comparable) then you would expect to see a rapid growth and then the growth will tail off and the numbers active will remain relatively constant.

The certified community, due to the higher investment involved, is relatively resistant to various attacks but due to its dependence on fixed facilities it is at risk of a collapse once these fall below a critical mass.

In the UK, I think the UK CAA zero-tolerance infringements policy will have a big effect (on the fleet flying with transponders) but not for another year or two by which time its drivers will have moved on.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The UK CAA has published a GA safety study – CAP1886 – which contains some interesting numbers on GA activity

The UK is the only European country showing there for which they show total hours flown. For others they show just accidents per 100k hrs etc etc.

There is a clear decline, so the assertion by the DfT here is obviously incorrect, although the numbers improved a bit into 2019.

Massive decline in New Zealand.

As an incidental observation, page F-4 shows some staggering stats on how many get killed in some countries which have almost no GA (or where GA has gone largely underground, to UL) compared to the UK which is quite obviously doing really well on safety.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

The UK CAA has published a GA safety study – CAP1886 – which contains some interesting numbers on GA activity

What do the figures mean?

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

It described it in the PDF. The big numbers are annual hours flown, I think.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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