Peter wrote:
Less of the bitterness please.Nothing is free anyway in this business. The savings mainly come from
downsizing
doing own work and not accounting for one’s time
wangling somebody else to do it for beer or whatever
Pretending otherwise is just doing a disfavour to newcomers.
Well, yes, but what has happened in the last 50 to 100 years is manufactured “stuff” has gotten cheaper while (paid) labor has gotten more expensive. Obviously hand made, high labor intensive stuff like an aircraft has become exponentially more expensive. Where an average person could afford a certified aircraft in the 60s and 70s, this is not possible today. For ULs, relatively cheap labor in eastern European countries has offset this for a long time, but that seems to be coming to and end as well. Now, on top of that, you have to add all the labor cost for certification, which also has increased disproportionally to basic material.
The result of this is exactly what we see today. On a world wide basis, only about 1500 aircraft are produced each year. It has been this way the last 40+ years. No matter how you try to look at this, the conclusion is that the certified GA industry is incapable of producing and selling enough aircraft. The people who in the 60s and 70s had the money, don’t have the money today, and haven’t had it for the last 40 years. The market doesn’t exist.
There are other complications (merely symptoms IMO), because the main issue is never going away, at least not without cutting big chunks of unnecessary overhead.
I’m not bitter 
(why do you say that? ) I’m just saying it as it is. In the US, they are at least trying to tackle the problem (finally, after 40+ years). In Europe, not so much – yet. Why so long? Let’s call i “conservatism” then although that’s only a part of the issue.
I believe that whatever actually is done (MOSAIC and an eventual similar thing in Europe), will be too little, too late anyway. The world has changed too much the last 1/2 a century. In the 60s and 70s people also believed that flying cars was just around the corner (some few still do ) It’s also very obvious by now that battery powered aircraft will only be a curiosity for the foreseeable future, and it doesn’t matter if it’s an airplane or some flying drone thing.
GA as a mean of transportation, like the car, is a concept that is dead. Some unoptainium has to be invented first. It’s a recreational vehicle, like a boat or an MC. Both can be super practical like nothing else, but the main mode is recreation. As such, most people have more time available than money, and this is exactly what the kit industry and UL industry shows. People don’t mind spending lots of time on something that is a super interesting form of recreation. Perhaps the authorities are smarter than I give them credit for. Perhaps they have looked at the kit industry and the UL industry the last 40 years and said, OK, let’s see where this is going. If that’s the case, then it’s obvious that some “angry old men” agreed as long as certified GA was left untouched.
Both the kit industry and the UL industry have showed by now that this works. Two relatively big and viable industries have grown out of almost nothing, and it’s all based on recreation. Lots of synergies between those two, avionics, engines, production methods, and more or less the same people. This is obviously the future of GA, because certified GA is not it, proved during the last 40 years.
while (paid) labor has gotten more expensive
Indeed, which is why freelance maintenance saves one so much money. It roughly halves ownership costs. What makes it hard on certified types? Airport politics. Not the homebuilt versus certified. It is merely that
That’s why I would not simply recommend someone with limited funds to go down that route. It’s ok if you know what you are doing.
LeSving wrote:
GA as a mean of transportation, like the car, is a concept that is dead. Some unoptainium has to be invented first.
It used to be possible and in many places such as the US still is.
If that concept is dead and proven so, then my interest is gone too. And many others who fly to travel, not to simply bumble over the landscape.
GA works perfectly as a means of transportation
1hr flight versus a pretty crappy 4hr drive, or most of the day spent on trains.
Those who argue otherwise are probably trapped by a bad “ground situation” (e.g. poor access to the plane) or are flying some wreck with loads of downtime. Hmmm, yeah, a good label for a lot of GA… But is how GA is: you need to put some effort into setting up and managing your ground situation, otherwise the plane will be useless even if the plane itself is ok. You can’t just buy a plane and think that’s the job done. And this has never changed. It is just a lot easier in places which are much less “dog eat dog” and where land values are lower (the poorer parts of Europe in general, much of the US, etc).
Doing it to visit customers is more tricky, for reasons both wx related and political 
But I have one coming up: 1.25hr flight versus a 6hr drive or 9hrs by train.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
It used to be possible and in many places such as the US still is.
I never said it isn’t. The same goes for boats and MC, even a bicycle for that matter. But the thing is, 1500 aircraft produced each year world wide is just too few, way to few. It’s a fringe activity no matter how you look at it. There’s no big boom in sight. This isn’t the issue. Everyone can in principle get themselves a biz jet and cruise around the world, visiting all "B"s on the globe. But, reality stops 99.999999% from doing it. You have to climb down the ladder until your dream and reality meets. Right now that’s probably a Cirrus. There’s only about 5-600 of those produced each year also. You probably have to climb even further down, a 40 year old Mooney perhaps How will the situation be in 40 years, when that Mooney is 80 year old? Certified GA will get more and more fringe. There’s no other way this can go.
Peter wrote:
That’s why I would not simply recommend someone with limited funds to go down that route. It’s ok if you know what you are doing.
That’s a correct view of it. It’s part of the reality. The future GA pilots have to adapt to the reality of things. It’s a slow process probably mostly governed by self selected personality traits.
But the thing is, 1500 aircraft produced each year world wide is just too few, way to few.
It is exactly what the world needs to support e.g. the 1500 combined GA airport operations that will occur in my local area today. Markets are a wonderful thing, they don’t make what isn’t needed, and when it is needed they make more.
The great thing about GA is that it isn’t a consumer treadmill, where manufacturers in collaboration with regulators control market demand and production volume via planned obsolescence. Only avionics has evolved in that negative direction, the planes themselves have not (and neither has FAA regulation) and flying them represents an escape from having one’s life manipulated. Hence my lack of interest in new installed avionics, and very real interest in the enduring value of owning an GA aircraft and using it to fly places near and far for as many years as I want to do so, before passing it to the next guy to do the same.
Here BTW are the operations per year statistics for the four GA only airports closest to me, all within 30 miles. The numbers haven’t changed for years. Does this look like an activity that is starving for new planes? Does it look like GA for transport is no longer active?
If I did the arithmetic right and the total operations per day of these four local GA airports combined are 1934/day, of which 766/day are GA transportation flying and neglecting a few military transients and air taxis the rest are local GA flying. Although there are a few, by my observation a very small fraction of these operations are by UL/LSA types, by which I mean single digit percentage or maybe a fraction of one percent.
There is also another GA airport locally that has about 100,000 operations per year but it’s 38 miles away, plus a number of others that are closer but which have a smaller operations count. If you include those it’s maybe 2500 nearby operations per day in total.
Public transport, acceptance of limitations, shutdown of long distance personal mobility, fear and state-planned living are nowadays what many people may see as their future. It’s a sad reflection on society. But it isn’t actually what many other people in many places will buckle under and accept. Some of those people are and will be flying themselves places
LeSving wrote:
You probably have to climb even further down, a 40 year old Mooney perhaps How will the situation be in 40 years, when that Mooney is 80 year old?
How it’s gonna be in 40 years when I would be 100 but probably long dead and disposed of is of little concern now. But you are right, there is a MASSIVE problem with the fact that it has become pretty much impossible to certify any airframe for GA use today in a way that makes financial sense. That is why all our GA planes are based on type certificates which are decades old.
And btw, we are not the only ones. Look at the Boeing 737 saga. To this day, all 737’s are based on a type certificate of an airplane which came in 1967. The bloody thing to this day does not have up to date instrumentation, e.g. EICAM/EICAS systems, unlike the 747 which got it with the 400 series which have it since 1989 and the 757/767 which came on line 1982. It still has the same overhead panel the original 100 series had with some slight mods. So even if you fly a brand new Max you are confronted with 1960ties technology. Why? Because it would be too expensive to certify even for Boeing. And even those they did certify recently, such as the Dreamliner, were very close to pushing Boeing to it’s financial limits.
For the very same reason, there can’t be any new Mooney, even the latest Ultras were still M20’ties with a bunch of mods, there won’t be any Piper to replace the Cherokee and there is nothing to replace the 172 or similar concepts. It just does not make financial sense. The SR20/22 is as far as I know the most recent totally new designed certified airplane which made it past semi-bancruptcy to a success. The Columbia/Corvalis was similar, but also it’s parent went bust and got sold to Cessna.
I did talk to some friends at Mooney when they tried to develop the M10. Yes, they were totally naive doing it and failed miserably. But none of the folks there was prepared for the fact that by now, certification of any white sheet design will take up the better part of 10-15 years in which you only but in money. Hence, it is simply not possible to do. Not in the US anyway.
As a difference: The Grumman’s AA5’s were at the time designed and certified in someithing like 2 years. Unthinkable today. Also airliners at the time took significantly less time to certify. I have a suspicion that if the certification hurdles had been what they are now in the 1950ties and 60ties, we’d still be flying Constellations, Seven Seas and Tudors over the NATL.
In Europe we’ve actually seen better conditions and more airplanes certified such as the Diamonds and various Tecnams and Pipistrels. Still, there are spectacular failures such as the Panthera and several others which never made it past certification.
So that is why GA is limited to 60-80 year old designs. And because numbers are that small, prices are irresponsibly high. In a normal world, the price for a bog standard PA28 or 172 should never exceed the one of a mid size SUV or similar car. Instead they cost the equivalent of a stately home in the US. That is simply ridikkulous and one main reason why GA is failing. And because there is practically no “new” market but only a very lively used market.
(in fact, looking at the 737, the situation with the Airbusses is not that different, also the A320 is still the pretty much original design safe for some upgrades. The actual replacement was bought in from Canadair.)
The biggest reason for the situation with the 737 is nothing to do with certification, it is the result of Southwest Airlines flying ONLY 737s, having built their business on them, and not wanting to change to something on a different TC.
Silvaire wrote:
The biggest reason for the situation with the 737 is nothing to do with certification, it is the result of Southwest Airlines flying ONLY 737s, having built their business on them, and not wanting to change to something on a different TC.
If that is the case, Boeing has once again proven to have very bad decision makers. And the FAA has shown a remarkable lack of balls to allow them to do this. The 737 is operating under an exception to the mandate for EICAM/EICAS. To this day.
(Frankly, when I got to know the 737-800 recently up eclose and personal, I was totally amazed at the backwardness of that airplane, for the fact that it is a relatively newer design. Having known only the 747/757/767 avionics before, I was shocked to see that those planes have much more modern systems monitors and proper EICAM/EICAS systems which allow you to track down malfunctions fairly quickly. In the 737 you have a few skimply lights and then have to do your analysis the same way we did on the Caravelle and Tupolev, going into the overhead panel and trying stuff, when in a 747-400 I can simply pull up the relevant systems page and know what is happening fairly fast. Totally appalling. The Busses are really high tech against that. )
