How many pilots have packed it all up due to the coronavirus situation?

I haven’t dropped out entirely but there are some factors that are limiting my flying a lot:

• it is becoming harder and harder to justify spending so much money on such an activity. in the past there well less options for entertainment available and less could be done with the same money. now there is such a great catalog of things you can do in your free time and most cost a dime compared to flying.
• things are getting more and more complicate, every time we go flying it’s an hassle with airports bureaucracy, PPR, fuel availability, Ad to comply with, and again, the rest of the fun things to do keep getting simpler and simpler to organize and do.
• AIRCRAFTS ARE FREAKING OLD! don’t try to no see this guys. only us can justify 200€ an hour (this if you rent, if you own it, it’s even more) in an old rusty 172 from the 70’s (that makes it 50 years old….try to think of ANY other activitiy that uses such old things as common tools for everyday operations, not part of some vintage club) with thousands of flying hours with an air cooled carb engine that needs prime to be turned on. Only millionaires can really enjoy new aircrafts (sr22) and even them have their limits in terms of modernity (avionics are great, engine..ehm..). Ultralights bring a bit of light to the scene, with modernity all around, but they come with so many limitations and restrictions, and an exponentially increasing cost (a full equipped VL3 goes for 270k€ now) that again, not great.
• it’s a risky activity and family, bombed everyday with news of new cases, deaths, limitations, etc.. finds it more and more difficult to happily hop on board all together and trust the tiny engine upfront when crossing a mountain pass/ lake/ night flying etc..

Just reading my aéroclub AGM minutes. There was a report by the local député (member of parliament): the club lost a net 1.6% of its membership over Covid, but some other sporting associations in the department had lost up to 40%. He “noted that the flying club was able to maintain the framework of its essential activities, and the link between its members” (translated).

Ours has become a planning for the future problem. That’s not to say there wasn’t a similar problem before Covid.
The number of new members since Covid have certainly increased. Some have returned after a much longer either lay off or are returning to the region because of retirement.
A few have switched to ULM as age has made it more difficult to keep the medical. Switching to ULM often means that they buy or build their own aircraft and therefore they no longer fly or have cut the number of hours they fly on the club aircraft.
On top of this a large proportion of the new members are young. The DTO is very busy with training but there will come a stage when these young people with their new PPLs will go elsewhere for work.
It puts the club on a cusp. Not enough hours to buy another aircraft and if we bought a 2 seater with a Rotax engine for PPL training which would make the hourly rate cheaper it would have an adverse impact on the number of hours flown on the existing 4 seater aircraft.
These complications have become more apparent since Covid when we have a sudden influx of people who want to learn to fly. But we have no data on how long they will stick flying with the club after they get their PPL.
Although the DTO offers LAPL training as well, in France it offers very few if any advantage over taking the PPL or UL licence that no one seems to take it up.

Peter wrote:

Quite a number of long-timers (flying for say 20 years) have sold up and quite a few seem to have taken up sailing

And I can see more of that happening with the fuel costs rocketing, especially anyone living in a coastal area.

We did our first sailing trip on the bank holiday to Northern Ireland, and it’s definitely a much better experience than the average GA airport:

• No need to fill in any paperwork. No GAR to go from the Isle of Man to NI, you just get the sails up and point the bow west.
• No PPR to go to the marina. You just turn up, subject to tide. Many harbours and marinas are open H24, even when no staff are present.
• You get to sail in formation with dolphins.
• Everyone on board has to be involved in the operation of the vessel, no sitting around getting bored.
• Fees were £21 for Ardglass marina. For that you get more than tying your plane down on a draughty expanse of concrete: you get proper facilities (showers etc.) that are open H24, and of course you stay on your boat so no paying for hotels.
• Marinas/harbours are usually within a three minute walk of the centre of the town or village they are in.
• Not much wind on our way out so we motorsailed most of the outbound leg and used the huge amount of… 3 litres of fuel.
• Our harbour fees in the Isle of Man are about £95 per year (although I will admit this is pretty exceptional, the Isle of Man is to sailing what the USA is to GA).

Then there’s other things: if you’re mechanically inclined, you can do all your own maintenace without having to have someone with a special licence involved in the process. No need for parts to have paperwork, no need for inspectors to sign stuff off. Parts are a lot less expensive. We put a brand new DSC radio and fitted an AIS transponder for about a third of the cost of just the transponder in the Auster.

No, I’m not about to give up flying, or even give up flying trips – but I can imagine quite a few pilots making the change altogether. Sailing scratches a lot of the same itches as flying does, while being a good order of magnitude less expensive than even a modest aircraft.

Well, looks like I am going to definitly loose my homebase in 2023, end of the year, so I need to relocate the airplane until then. LSZH has decided to put parking fees up by a factor of about 20, that is from 400 CHF a month to about 8000.- This will probably end all GA flying of stationed airplanes, even though there is still a grace period of 2 hours for GA, after which you pay as much as a biz jet. One flight school of long standing has already put up its full fleet for sale and some others are not amused either.

Why is this Covid related? Apparently the new pricing was developed during this time and nobody really had a closer look or cared to look until it was approved by the FOCA and therefore now set in stone.

Not sure yet what I am going to do, but most probably either move the plane to Speck Fehraltdorf (or Birrfeld) or sell up and get out, even though that option looks less attractive right now because of the horriffic airline prices, which makes flying with our Mooney financially viable again.

Sailing scratches a lot of the same itches as flying does, while being a good order of magnitude less expensive than even a modest aircraft.

Indeed. It’s much of the same thing. Many sailors also fly, at least for a while, then go back to sailing for several perfectly understandable reasons.

I went from sailing to flying.
Sailing is much more difficult to do solo and for some reason I found the responsibilities of being skipper much more onerous on a boat than a plane.