AdamFrisch wrote:
Bottom line is it feels like everyone have to work twice as much just to pay for the cost of living. Simply isn’t any time or money to go fly anymore and a polarization between the have and have-not’s. It’s either ULM or jet flying now – and very little in between.
That’s certainly an important point. As an employee, even if highly skilled and comparably well paid, you just don’t make enough money these days to buy your own aircraft unless you really prioritise that over all else or are content with some 50-year old junk that flies 90 kts at best, so not the typical touring planes.
So these people, who make up the largest part of those who are interested in flying at all, go the ULM route because it is cheaper or rent. Both is not conductive to “touring GA”.
Jujupilote wrote:
Myself I do the very minimum to keep my license and wouldn’t be available to do any significant club work. Without the support of my loved ones, I would consider flying altogether. The global situation makes GA a low priority for me. My family can live without it.
Much depends on your life situation. I started flying at 23, ran out of time and money after my third child was born at 37, stopped flying for 17 years and then started again. Now at 62 I’m flying more than I did in my first flying life and I also spend a lot of unpaid time being the president of my club. (That’s actually the main reason I’m not buying my own aircraft or joining a syndicate — I don’t have the time to both take care of the club and an aircraft of my own. So why do I stay on? It’s kind of fun and running a club helps people get into flying. Not that I run the club by myself. We have lots of other great people.)
AdamFrisch wrote:
Bottom line is it feels like everyone have to work twice as much just to pay for the cost of living. Simply isn’t any time or money to go fly anymore and a polarization between the have and have-not’s. It’s either ULM or jet flying now – and very little in between.
That is, I think, highly country dependent. Real (inflation-adjusted) salaries in the EU have increase by 16% over the past 10 years — even taking into account the current high inflation rate. It does differ between countries. France and Germany are very close to the EU average. Sweden had 21%. So there’s a lot of money around. (Which, incidentally, makes the outrages over high energy prices a bit ironic.)
The high inflation rate we have now will not make a lot of difference (except psychologically) unless it stays for several years.
Another ‘decline’ thread with hardly any actual data. One day I might actualy believe GA is dead and gone, only to go to my airport and see it is thriving. Are these topics created just to generate a discussion and traffic or what?
I have an idea, Bobo. You can organise the next fly-in 
How about in NL. It is quite “central”.
Let’s see how many will fly in across more than say 200nm.
terbang wrote:
The decline in trip reports is rather an effect of this.
The real bummer about trip reports is that many fora do not allow upload of images but need “external hosting” of the images. It’s one thing we struggle with at Flightforum and I know that there are other fora who have similar issues. Before it was dirt easy on FB and so on to upload pics, people did go through the trouble to upload their stuff to flicker or get some webspace and then link them, today they simply don’t bother but use platforms which allow this. Well, EuroGa is one of them, which is a really good thing.
terbang wrote:
I really try hard to to do write-ups here when there is anything to tell, but I struggle to write something when the story is „Flew to XX, had a chat with other pilots, had dinner and a beer, flew home“.
I tell you what: For all those people hungry for flying stories they’d be happy to read these and look at the pics. Those stories like the write ups on Peter’s site and on the various fora got me back flying in 2009. And many trip reports have kept me from quitting since. So don’t be stopped by thinking that these trips are not interesting to you anymore, but they are to others.
Apart, the work you personally have done in trip reports is just outstanding. Many thanks for that.
Bobo wrote:
Another ‘decline’ thread with hardly any actual data. One day I might actualy believe GA is dead and gone, only to go to my airport and see it is thriving. Are these topics created just to generate a discussion and traffic or what?
Well, I think Peter has a lot of contacts in the GA scene, so his subjective impression based on what he sees and hears from others can legitimately inform a thesis on trends in GA.
However, to prove or disprove a thesis one does indeed need data, but that will be very hard to come by for this kind of question, simply because those owner pilots flying more than the typical 100 nm burger runs are usually rather keen on privacy and no public or private organisation can fully monitor their activities.
Peter wrote:
Today these have mostly died, or de facto died. These were full of people going places, all over Europe, and writing about it.
Many fora have died because people move on to social media. Not necessarily because they are better but they are easier to use. See above, particularly the uploading of pics is a huge issue which most fora can not accomodate due to sheer data volume.
Peter wrote:
People stopped posting stuff which might get them into some kind of legal trouble. I
And that is because there are people who will actually turn them in. And no, most of the time not CAA or TSB folks but other pilots or other people who think they are self-appointed policemen. And this does go beyond aviation. Nowadays you need a lawyer to review your posts if you really post a lot or have a channel on YT or so.
The other bit is that self proclaimed experts who think everything has to be regulated to death and banned as too dangerous have had a MASSIVE rise in recent years. I just now started a thread about this, as things got quite out of hand in some threads I follow elsewhere. Add to it the infestation of lawyers as opposed to people with real connection to aviation in the regulators who feel the same and who are often empowered by the press and “action groups” who pressure them to regulate more and more.
Peter wrote:
In 2000 flying was easier in planning terms. No GAR (!), no GENDEC, no airport PPR booking sites, no Fraport extracting money from most Greek airports. And – while one should be realistic about avgas cost versus landing fees – airports were nearly all very cheap. Biarritz €10… None of this is impossible but now you need to be quite keen to email several airports and wait for replies. Anyway, the challenges are a different topic.
That I would say is the biggest deterrent to the “going places” crowd. Yes. absolutely.
In the 1990ties I did several trips with my Cessna 150, to Spain, France, often on a whim without much more than standard prep. That is practically impossible now, at least out of Switzerland, you need PPR for almost everything. Looking back at the destinations I flew to, 90% of them are now practicing GA outpricing and slottery / PPR. Yes, I did like to fly to larger airports, such as Geneva, Lyon (Bron), Grenoble St. Geoirs, Vienna, Frankfurt and so on. What did you do? File a flight plan and go. today, it’s a question of weeks of e-mails, phone calls, informing everybody and his dog that you’re coming and so on.
Why IR rating figures have not improved has a lot to do with the fact that in order to use IFR you need IFR equipped airports. Many of those have become unavailable due to the reasons quoted above, so lots of people don’t bother. I will loose my IFR homebase and will have to resort to a grass strip by the looks of it. So my motivation to get my IR back has massively decreased.
Fly ins: My experience even before Covid was that many fly ins were too ambitious in planning, particularly if VFR crowd is involved. FF is organizing a yearly fly in, which we did again this year, 60% dropped out (most last minute) due to weather, which was flyable but GAFOR D or M. Fly outs, I have stopped to try to organize ambitious routes as they almost always fall foul to weather and concentrate on small airfields someplace out of the beaten track within 2 hours or so of homebase. For IFR things are different, clearly.
As for the profile of owners, I don’t see much of a change really, only that there are fewer. If any change, than I think there are more young folks who get into aviation and have the money to buy airplanes. Many drop out darn fast as they discover they don’t have the money to run them.
The other bit about folks disappearing between 30 to 50 to rise kids has shifted to 40-70, as people generally have kids later in life as they need to finish university or are more involved in business and push off having kids until they need reproductive medicine. Hence, the former 50-70 owner groups may simply not be at freedom to do that. And once they do, loads of them can’t get medicals anymore.
For those who work and have kids, the prime problem is time. I see lots of airplanes (including mine) which sit around gathering dust because the owners are in harsh 24/7 regimes and somehow hope that “next year” they will come back to flying but never do, as their day is regulated by demands on time from rise to fall. I’ve been in that situation for the last 6 or 7 years and many pilots whom I know who quit quote this as their main reason why they did quit.
Yesterday I landed to Roskilde EKRK and I was amazed with quantity of traffic there – more than on Croatian CAT airports. Although the majority were training flights there was a lot of other GA traffic as well. Two perpendicular runways, ILS approach on each runway, RNP approaches, low fees, lots of parking place, no PPR (just 1 hour PN for international flights for which is sufficient to submit flight plan what you would do anyway) – it looks like GA paradise to me. Not that it proves anything but it would be nice to get feedback from Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, Czechia, Poland etc. to check whether GA is in decline.
Peter wrote:
I have an idea, Bobo. You can organise the next fly-inHow about in NL. It is quite “central”.
Let’s see how many will fly in across more than say 200n
I have no interest in fly-ins, to be honest. That’s why I never signed up, but this doesn’t mean I’m not flying anywhere. I do not fly to those complicated airports I keep reading about in Spain and Greece, but at the places I do visit I have had mostly very positive experiences. Just like reading this forum is, by the way. It’s been an inspiration for quite a few memorable flights. I was just curious as to the reason this thread exists. Most people reading and posting here are flying places, I think it’s the people leaving the forum are the ones that can shed some light here.
