achimha wrote:
Obviously there is no connection neither to gold nor storks. The business is a totally different one when building thousands of airplanes a year versus just a hand full. Good old economy of scale. I am pretty sure that Cessna is neither fully committed to continuing SEP production nor treating this as a pure financial decision.
Indeed. Did you know that the amount of US crude oil imports from Norway correlates strongly with the number of drivers killed in collisions with a railway train? Or that the number of people who drowned after falling out of a fishing boat correlates strongly with the marriage rate in Kentucky? A coincidence? I wouldn’t think so! This website will help you find these and many other interesting correlations.
tinfoilhat wrote:
tinfoilhat 10-Aug-15 13:24 #48
alioth wrote:
Cost of a C172 when it came out in 1956: $8700
Cost of a C172R in 2012: $275K
Typical median income in 1956 for one person: $3600
Typical median income in 2012 for an entire household: $56000
What has changed since 1956? In 1971 Nixon closed the Gold Window…There! Somebody had to say it.In 1956 gold was priced at $35 per ounce. You could buy a C172 for 248 oz of gold
In 2015 gold is priced at approx $1100 per ounce. ie you can now buy a new C172, with all its upgraded spec for (drum roll…) 250 oz of gold. There can be few pieces of consumer technology that have changed as little as a C172 in the last 60 years so I think that is actually quite an important economic comparison.
!
Well being late to the party and having read every ones comment I tend to agree with all of you that there is a kernel of truth in everyones input.
The one thing most of us forget about is that the 100s of thousands of pilots that were produced during WW2 who had the Charles Lindbergh fantasy. These same guys who were in their teens and 20s went onto buy airplanes in their 40s and 50s. Im not even counting the countless pilots produced by the GI bill post WW2 and Korea. These same guys are now in their 70s and 80s. I know cause I hang out with them. Sad to say they are leaving us faster every year. Thats one big reason for the decline in the pilot population.
These same guys when in business flew themselves with Barons, Bonansas Beeches and Cessas 310s 210s and Piper comanches on business trips in the US. They would also use these same planes for personal travel. In the past 30 years Corp America put the kibosh on business flying for the company unless it was privately held and the owner was the boss. Ever wonder why the explosion of business jets in the past 20 yrs.?
In the US there is a govt produced no inflation policy. Read that to mean no wage growth for the masses. Any wage growth is equated to inflation. Why is inflation bad? Well first off if you should be so lucky as to buy a house with a standard 30 year Fixed mortgage and lets say your monthly payments are $2000/ month. You are making $4000 a month/48,000/yr and just squeaking by for the first 5 years. However with a 5% modest inflationary growth per year in your income after 30 years it would be $17,287/m or $207,453/yr. Do you see why the govt tries to control inflation? Having inflation definitely does not help the banks. I know for a fact that my parents and their peers by the time their mortgages were up after 30 yrs were paying almost double their mortgage payments in property taxes per year. When they started the inverse was true.
In order to help the financial institutions, inflation must be kept low and if that means offshoring your job so be it. We must protect the people who we (politicians) depend on financially to get into office, stay in office, and when out of office contribute to our honorarium or consulting fees.
An added benefit of the govt contriving no inflation numbers is the ability to not pay an increase in the SS payments which is mandated in US law to cover inflation.
How things work in Europe I have no clue but you can take what I said above to the bank when it comes to the US new world of economic engineering.
Another thing hampering GA is the fact that it takes a lot of effort to remain current enough to fly as a practical transportation tool. If you stay super current in the US because of all the small airports which are supported by the govt and dotted across the country GA can be used as a transportation tool. Not so much here in Europe. With most small GA airports unsupported and a distance from major cities it is less relevant considering you can hop on an airline and behalf way across Germany in 1 hr. or across the EU in 2 and pay 1/5 the the cost of flying yourself.
Here is the difference. I would fly into Logan (Boston), National (Washington DC), Newark (for New York or) JFK all for a $25 landing fee. If I gassed up no handling fee. You better declare an emergency if you expect to land on any aiport similar to the ones mentioned above here in Europe otherwise you’ll find yourself in debtors prison.
GA is dying from a thousand cuts and its not from any one thing all the bullet points were already mentioned.
PS As for the Chinese.: General Aviation is about freedom. There is no way aviation will thrive there unless the govt changes into something totally unrecognizable.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Airborne_Again 10-Aug-15 15:54 #51
achimha wrote:
Obviously there is no connection neither to gold nor storks. The business is a totally different one when building thousands of airplanes a year versus just a hand full. Good old economy of scale. I am pretty sure that Cessna is neither fully committed to continuing SEP production nor treating this as a pure financial decision.
Indeed. Did you know that the amount of US crude oil imports from Norway correlates strongly with the number of drivers killed in collisions with a railway train? Or that the number of people who drowned after falling out of a fishing boat correlates strongly with the marriage rate in Kentucky? A coincidence? I wouldn’t think so! This website will help you find these and many other interesting correlations.
Airborne having been to Maine I can best attest to the divorce rate correlating with Margarine consumption. 
In the US there is a govt produced no inflation policy. Read that to mean no wage growth for the masses.
Over the last 27 years my salary has increased a average of 7% per year in stable corporate employment. Meanwhile, a Pitts S2 that cost $70K then costs $70K now, and many other very nice aircraft are the same.
That aside, I’ve found it useful to be doing what others are doing to make money, and not following trends to spend it and enjoy it. My analogy in having fun is going to the beach… If you aimlessly follow the crowd and plunk down your towel near the entrance from the parking lot, you’ll find yourself surrounded by (often unpleasant) people. Walk very little further, away from the crowd, and things are a lot better. It doesn’t take far.
Yeah but we now full well by now you’re not part of hoi polloi, Silvaire… 7% salary cagr is not really the US average – much less so in “stable corporate employment”.
my first post is about the Gold Standard. My wife would not be surprised!
And a very convincing debut, indeed! Now you may start raising more thought provoking subjects like Cirrus RG or an STC to get rid of the BRS :-)
Either it has not been mentioned before or I didn’t read every posting: The real big “crash” in aircraft sales and associated steep increase of new airframe prices was caused not by European legislation or fuel prices or environmental concerns or decrease in household income. Instead, greedy U.S. lawyers drove liability claims up by two orders of magnitude in the first half of the 1980ies. That was slightly corrected beginning in 1994, but the industry never recovered. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalization_Act
I rarely disagree with you what_next but actually I don’t buy the product liability angle.
I think that what instead happened is that piston GA sales collapsed by a factor of at least 10x (due to reasons already mostly discussed) in the 80s, and the product liability angle was a really useful excuse for manufacturers to stop production of non-selling products.
In the same way as most aircraft owners prefer to sell quietly (prefer to not admit to their peer group that they are forced to sell by their bank, after an incident which destroyed their confidence, or whatever) most GA manufacturers did not want to admit the real reasons for pulling the plug on the airframes which had not changed for say 30 years.
Maybe somebody did identify some massive theoretical liability but I haven’t read a summary of it which showed how the whole industry would have collapsed under it. Most of the huge American settlements, massive figures and media coverage notwithstanding, end up haggled to a tiny % of the original headline figure, and often the settlement is paid by somebody else anyway (out of a group of defendants being sued jointly, there is likely to be one whose insurer just says “screw this – just write them a cheque for $1M and move on”).
I have never seen an example of any US aviation related company whose published accounts show actual product liability payouts (as distinct from a PL provision) as anything other than a trivial amount.
The 18 year GARA liability limit sounds strange to me, too. Why 18 years?
I think that what instead happened is that piston GA sales collapsed by a factor of at least 10x ,..
But that collapse was only evident in the States, for almost a decade. European manufacturers thrived during that time by filling the vacuum generated by Cessna halting it’s piston aircraft production. Just look at Socata (your opening pictures) or Grob in Germany. They never sold more planes than during that time.
Yes that is true, but maybe for a different reason: Socata filled a hole in the market for modern looking aircraft.
The Americans never went for that hole – well not until Cirrus came many years later and took over from Socata, and did a much better job of the marketing, especially in the USA where Socata never really became known. It was IMHO mostly Cirrus’ success (especially big at the time) which made Socata throw their piston production away.
I think America was well behind Europe when it came to the desirability of styling. And here in Europe, in my business (electronics) you could too have sold a product inside a simple crude-looking metal box, up to about the 1980s. After that, styling was mandatory even in industrial / business products.
Socata sold relatively poorly in the USA. I don’t have the figures to hand but it is of the order of 1/3 of total shipments – and that’s into a GA community which is much bigger than the rest of the world put together.
That US community has always been very stagnant, not interested in nice looking planes, and Cirrus realised they won’t make any headway unless they come up with something that looks a lot better and is marketed at a different sort of person.
So I think Socata, Grob and others came along at the right time and filled a hole which none of the existing players thought was important. The existing players thought they could for ever sell stuff that looked like combine harvesters.
