mh wrote:
Actually, both is very well possible, depending on what you look for in aviation. There is no such thing as “the one truth” in this matter.
I think there are if we want GA to live. Today’s recipe with certification of everything do not help. There is no good reason for a recreational vehicle to be certified. It’s just a useless and incredible expensive remnant from the time GA really was a utility (of appreciable size). That time is gone, and will never come back. Commercial GA with helicopters and bizjets will still live on, because there are people willing to pay for it.
I am very reliably informed that boats are very effective for the, ahem, “social” side 
Getting from A to B is not always the objective. Well, not with A and B being very different locations
And the social side is what GA is not very good for.
We had a thread here recently on which pilots have taken up sailing – here
Alexis,
why do you take my and mh’s comments as personal attacks?
You were to my knowledge not the one who advised any of the folks I advised later on. But I have come across enough folks who do exactly that, put myths into circulation which keep folks from joining the owner-pilot community by talking rubbish. Clearly you have expressed the opinion that newer airplanes are more worthwile. I’d say they may well be if they fit the budget and the needs of the people who are considering buying.
I will call someone a snob who will park his shiny new plane next to someone else’s pride and joy and then make derogatory remarks about it, or someone who will tell people who ask about airplane ownership that anything below a 250k airplane is not worthwile or even worse, that people who can’t afford that should not be in GA altogether! You never said that, to my knowledge at least, but I have talked to enough people who took the advice of such folks and shied away.
But if we are talking of a decline here, it has a LOT to do with the overall population we have in GA. All I am saying is, regardless of the age of the airframes, it is much better if we have a owner/pilot population which includes folks with spending power from 20k on upwards rather than only folks who can buy quarter million Euro planes. Like you, many will start up with a cheaper VFR airframe and then work their way up. But if they never get started, they never get there.
I see this development in Mooneyspace a lot: Folks start with a C or E model because they are what they can afford and eventually work their way up to newer and better models. Quite a few eventually changed makes, either for twins or for Cirrus or whatever. As you said yourself, in the case of the possibility that one day things are not so good economically, they might move back to something more affordable.
And we are not talking only of 50 year old machines like mine here, the oldest Ovations for a start are around 10 years old, that is not that much.
All I have been trying to say, apparently very badly put, is that if we want GA to maintain it’s current level or increase, we will have to increase the population. Aircraft ownership is NOT reserved to millionaires, or rather it should not be. And if there are folks who talk as if it was a perogative of millionaires, then I will counter that claim.
Flyer59 wrote:
If airplane factories cannot sell new airplanes anymore, because most people cannot afford them .. then we can fly older airplanes for the next 20, 50, years.
New airplane buyers need to be introduced to the market somehow. Many pilots I know are folks who started up either very early or in their 30ties or 40ties, when they do get some spare money and wonder what to do. In order to breed a pilot/owner who will eventually buy a new or newer airframe, he will at that stage maybe have flown already 10-20 years and then is ready for the upgrade. You did that, I did that, apart from Peter I don’t know anyone whose first plane was a brand new current GA plane, most owners started out with something else.
Flyer59 wrote:
And what will we fly after that if no new airplanes are made anymore? In 50 years?
That is not the situation, is it. The budget racers of in 50 years time are going to be airplanes built now or in up to 20 years from now, the current SR22’s, Ovations, possibly Pantheras if that one ever gets certified and the likes will then be the entry level airplanes, if we assume that there will still be a GA infrastructure wise. I am not too scared about that in the US, Europe may end up differently.
Flyer59 wrote:
There still might be people who fly 172s, okay, but that will be comparable to people who have WW motorcycle today.
That is where I do disagree with you. It is not the question if someone is a classic plane enthusiast. it is the question of what he can afford. If I was able to afford a 500k or more airplane, I would probably not fly a 50 year old one, but something faster and most probably a twin for safety. So I have two possibilities. I can sit here and dream or I can realistically say, ok, no, 500k is not for me, but 50 k is, so what is availabe for that. And use my 50k budget and go flying! That is all I am saying. GA is a very high cost hobby for anyone who is privileged enough to afford it, but it can be open to a much wider population then what some suggest.
Misc. wrote:
They get off on the wonder of flight rather than from the aircraft they own or the stories they can tell of flying IMC inverted all the way down the ILS to minimums.
Well, again, you don’t need a recent airframe to do that. Most GA types can be equipped IFR and certified to fly this kind of operation. The question then is different: Does it have anti/de icing is one for starters, does it have the power to fly over the weather and all that. But most of that, a fully FIKI 60k € Seneca II can do as well if not as efficient as a newer plane.
mh wrote:
Decline in aviation is not a financial issue.
To an extent it is. I am not happy with the way that new airplanes today cost up to 10 yearly incomes of an average worker/employee type, when at the hidays of GA it was one to two. And I have asked the question again and again why that is so. I keep getting the same answers: Labour cost today is higher, certification cost (the amount of effort involved to certify an airplane, which translates into money) is exorbitantly higher, avionic requirements are MUCH higher, at least for IFR, and I keep being told about the cost of possible liability lawsuits by American sellers such as Mooney and also Cirrus.
Face it: There is no real relation between a 4 seated airplane and a house. It is totally out of relation if a new airplane today costs more than a rather larger family home, particularly if it doesn’t have to be that way.
However, there are other factors as well, especcially in Europe. We keep loosing airports either to closures (the UK seems to be very badly affected by that recently) or to ultrahigh fees with the aim of driving GA out. Additionally to that, you have many smaller airfields which are privately operated and are ruled by 18th century feudalist types so they are not really infrastructure but simply playgrounds for a restricted number of folks. That is wrong and that is one of the reasons why people are drawn off. Travelling in an airplane is only interesting if there is the infrastructure to match what you want to do. Currently that is still a manageable problem in most parts, but that may change. I don’t want to imagine what would happen in the EU if e.g. Schengen gets thrown out, as it appears to be quite likely. Comparing that with the infrastructure available in places like the US, and you see why we have a problem. PPR, grass runways which can’t be used year round, airports with ridiculous low yearly useage number caps (Oberschleissheim comes to mind) or others where a fully grown IFR airport is used by one company alone and locks everyone else out. These are things which need to change.
In first place we would need to distinguish between people whose first aim is to travel and people that just wants to fly for the sheer pleasure of it.
I’m clearly on the second group and my opinion is that (certified) GA is declining mainly because of:
- The enormous overcost of regulated maintenance
- The nuisance of not being able to do practically nothing (maintenance, upgrades…) by yourself
- The high fuel consumption of the usual engines (Conti, Lyco)
- The high price of AVGAS when used for private flying (related with the above reason)
- The increasing level of difficulties being put in place by an incresing number of airports (in Spain we’ve had enormous reduction in the hours of operation, big increases in fees, mandatory handling, etc)
And by exactly the opposite reasons, the non-EASA regulated aviation (homebuilts, microlights) has been boosted in the last 10 years.
My initial distinction is because if your main driver to fly is clearly to travel, probably you want 4+ seats, IFR, speed, ice protection… the kind of things that are not best achieved (or not achieved at all) by a microlight or a homebuilt.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Personally I would not touch a non-WAAS G1000 system,
What a snob 
Why would you assume that you need an over-equipped LPV-capable GPS to be able to fly in Europe?
See? You’re always the snob of someone. They are even those who try to make us think you need a jet to do IFR in Europe.
Why do you take my and mh’s comments as personal attacks?
Simply, because you addressed me personally and made it pretty clear too. Others, who sent me (8) eMails had the same opinion.
I will call someone a snob who will park his shiny new plane next to someone else’s pride and joy and then make derogatory remarks about it
I have never seen or heard about that, nor do i think it is very likely to happen. It’s just a conspiracy theory. Otherwise I would have experienced some of it in + 20 years.
I’ll leave it at that, i think i said what i wanted to say.
LeSving wrote:
There is no good reason for a recreational vehicle to be certified
There are plenty. The main reason is bad / dangerous engineering gets filtered to a certain degree, without having the customers pay for it. Although certain parts of certification can be questioned, it does provide a means of ensuring certain handling qualities and system integrity.
LeSving wrote:
t’s just a useless and incredible expensive remnant from the time GA really was a utility (of appreciable size). That time is gone, and will never come back.
Spoken like a real expert. Look, nothing is wrong with building some aircraft or building or buying off the shelf what someone has dreamt up and sold basically untested and unrevised. Yes, things like the RVs are good aircraft and they are tested a lot and design flaws have evolved out of the aircraft for the most issues. But that is entirely not true for many other designs and even some “certified light” aircraft (i.e. microlights) show dangerous “engineered” solutions. Certification itself isn’t too costly, though. If you design your product with the goal of certification, and you know what you are doing, many tasks can satisfy the certification process at a very early stage. If you are some maverick who thinks engineering is producing fancy colourful pictures with a computer, build some thing with wings and like to certify that, you might want to be prepared to write a big check to a good design organisation to sort out the type design.
And the accident rates among experimental aircraft IS higher:
Amateur-built aircraft had an accident rate three times higher than comparable factory-built certified aircraft conducting similar flight operations between 1988 and 2010. The fatal and serious injury accident rate was over five times higher in amateur-built aircraft, in particular due to relatively more serious injury accidents.
(https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/2007/ar-2007-043(2).aspx)
EDIT: I have hit “Submit” by accident. the accident rate might differ in culture, I will try to investigate further. At the moment I have just reviewed this source, further sources welcome.
Aviathor wrote:
What a snob Why would you assume that you need an over-equipped LPV-capable GPS to be able to fly in Europe?
ROFL! Actually I said that because I have talked to someone who learnt that his G1000 can’t be upgraded and his airfield has no ILS but an LPV approach. Also, someone mentioned that the WAAS upgrade for the G1000 in the Ovation/Acclaim costs up to 40k. I prefer to be flexible. My WAAS upgrade of the thrusty old GNS430 cost around 5k…
Aviathor wrote:
They are even those who try to make us think you need a jet to do IFR in Europe
LOL, well, depends what you want to do.
Flyer59 wrote:
Simply, because you addressed me personally and made it pretty clear too.
Sorry, I certainly did not mean for this to be a personal attack. My grudge with people like that come primarily from my recent experience with advising potential buyers.
Flyer59 wrote:
I have never seen or heard about that, nor do i think it is very likely to happen.
I don’t think the people who talk to me are all liers. Moreover I had it happen to me, more than once, before I did the upgrade, in the sense that I was called names for upgrading a 50 year old airframe to IFR. My answer was always the same: This is the plane I can afford and even upgraded it costs still a lot less then that man’s plane. I have to admit to a certain amount of Schadenfreude when I later heard that one of them has to invest more than I did to get WAAS and be able to operate to / from his homebase in IFR :)
mh wrote:
There are plenty. The main reason is bad / dangerous engineering gets filtered to a certain degree, without having the customers pay for it. Although certain parts of certification can be questioned, it does provide a means of ensuring certain handling qualities and system integrity.
The certification ensures you, legally so to speak, what you’ve mentioned. But be aware that the non-certification does not ensure you the opposite!
Probably all the non-certified types meets de facto all the important requirements. But not being forced to document it, makes the airplane much cheaper, more versatile and in fact (IMHO) enhances safety and availability.
In fact, certification acts nowadays as brake to innovation and it’s a burden, much more than a desirable thing for small, non complex in engineering sense, airplanes.
Even EASA has come to the same conslusion finally!
