When the middle class is in constant fear of personal economic decline, not many of them are going to take up flying.
I don’t know of anyone else who thinks a constant fear of personal economic decline is a factor in the decline of GA. Stand next to the nearest big road and count the cars above say €100k. That is today’s “middle class”, albeit probably the upper portion of it.
We have had many threads on this topic and it is a list of factors e.g. lack of a utility value (in Europe) due to stupid airport management, outdated training syllabus stuck in WW1, outdated hardware compared to what people have at home or in their car, lack of a social scene (not many women 
) keeps younger people out of it…
Sure if you read the Guardian or Oxfam press releases then the world is heading off the cliff, but most people who are in a position to learn to fly and keep at it don’t read the Guardian because they would need to get a big bottle of Prozac.
And it is comically to see some small business owners here valiantly fighting for the current system just because they are afraid of communism
That is a gross misunderstanding of the whole system of free enterprise and the ability of a person to improve his/her situation. Unfortunately starting a business is one of the few ways it can be done.
@Peter
Apart from German media I read both the Economist and the Guardian (used to read the telegraph as well until the got a paywall) and then form my own opinions. While the Guardian has some authors who seem to live in a strange bubble of their own, not all their articles are bad and some of the concerns they raise are valid. Same for the Economist by the way.
In Germany at least the fact that wages have not risen in real terms since the 1990s is acknowledged even by government statistics and reports. I live in a well-to-do place where there are also lots of expensive cars parked in front of affluent homes but I don’t think my environment is representative of the nation at large.
We discussed this in the elitism thread. My income is enough for PPL training and raising a family at the same time, but there isn’t much left for saving for a deposit or even an aircraft while my wife stays at home due to the kids. Now assuming I am in the top 10% of income in my country, where does this leave the remaining 90%. Will they easily be able to finance PPL training and flying afterwards? Not if they have children for sure or only once they are out of the house…
Easy on the coffee guys, it’s still early morning :-) (sorry couldn’t help that)
Maybe what is needed is an acceptance of this.
It is a fallacy that a PPL should be accessible to everyone. No matter how you shake the numbers, it comes to around 10k nowadays. That money has to come from somewhere. And then you have to find the bigger money to fly afterwards.
Who would argue that everybody should have the right to be able to climb Everest? I believe you can do it for c. 50k. Yet, that is probably not far off the average spend on GA activity over a pilot’s flying career.
The point is that this has never changed. It has always been the case that a PPL was not accessible to the [insert some figure over 90%] % of the population. And, go back say 30 years, those BMWs, Mercs, Ferraris, etc, what you can barely count going past you would not have been there. Unaffordable! Back then, you drove down the street in a Ford XR3i (£6.2k in 1983 – this was mine, near Pamplona) and people would turn around and look. When I started at univ, 1975, one guy had a PPL!! Jaws dropped all around when he said it cost 2k and he had to spend a few hundred a year to keep it going. Another had this and of course he got all the girls because he could take them out into Brighton Today, many more people have money. Even my son, 24, has a little home business, machining up some mountain bike parts on a milling machine, and has a Porsche! Yet, the GA scene in the 1960s and 1970s was much bigger and there is where the challenge lies.
Looking at where most European SR22 sales have gone, Germany is not doing badly…
You can fly for quite a bit less if you have a very small aircraft, but it will still be within the same order of magnitude if you actually go anywhere. So the way to keep flying cheap is to spend a lot of time on the internet.
One day Medewok you will be a consultant with a €150k car in the private hospital car park You will see patients at €200 for 30 mins, greeting them with a reassuring voice while writing notes with a €200 pen. I am sure you will be an excellent surgeon (or whatever) but god help any pilot who needs you to write detailed reports so he can get his medical back because “you” will have better things to do
Stand next to the nearest big road and count the cars above say €100k.
The market share of luxury cars in Germany is around 1 percent, and that includes all the higher priced 5series BMWs, Mercedes E-class, and so so.
That is still many times the number of active PPLs in Germany, so wealth is clearly not the limiting factor in GA activity in Germany.
MedEwok wrote:
These people are closing their eyes and putting fingers in their ears singing la la la because the truth doesn’t fit in well with their own political preferences and they’d actually prefer GA being a small and elitist endeavour without admitting it!
+1
Silvaire wrote:
I’m still trying to wrap my head around somebody’s concept of equal “opportunity” and “social mobility” being inversely correlated to the possibility of earning more money than the next fellow, given application of brainpower to work
I think you have to see it in context (and being less biased and less black vs white will also help ) The context is western, modern societies. The principle is really very simple. It’s about to what degree your family or the social status of your family, or the money of your family, will effect the choices you make regarding your own future social status. How free are you really to chose your own future. It’s not a “can if a want to” kind of thing, it’s a measure of how many people actually move socially. Your father is a janitor, your mother is working at McDonald’s, what is the chance you will end up as a lawyer. Everybody in any western, modern society has the opportunity to end up as a lawyer given those circumstances, given you have the personal ability to become one. But, statistics show that higher inequality in income creates a situation where the janitor son is not given equal opportunity compared with the son of a wealthy or high social status father/mother. The “low class boy” has to work much harder, so much that it doesn’t pay off personally for him. It also goes the other way for that matter.
In a growing economy, anything works, because there will always be high demand of people and services and lots of available capital to put in high risk projects. The money is put to work in a growing economy. It doesn’t matter who owns the money, money doesn’t care. As long as it’s put to use then everybody benefits. It’s when things cool down that the inequal income starts to become a real and negative factor. The reason is that the owner see more benefit in having the money stacked up in a safe place than to put them to use. That’s all there is to it really. Instead of cooling down a bit, the situation turns completely “medieval”, and money is slowly, but surely sucked up from the society, and into the hands of a very very few.
I think if income is held level across different kinds of jobs, there will be plenty of opportunities for anybody to study very hard, learn a lot, and get a challenging high profile job… because the average person would rather get the same money for less effort!
As far as I am concerned, social mobility is by defintion the opportunity to make more money so you can do more versus sitting around doing nothing, which is very economical. Why the heck else would you work hard to advance yourself? To qualify among effete European acedemics to attend their garden parties?
Silvaire wrote:
social mobility is by defintion the opportunity to make more money… Why the heck else would you work hard to advance yourself?Why indeed… Quality of life, self-satisfaction, pride?
Silvaire wrote:
Why the heck else would you work hard to advance yourself?
I don’t work hard. And that’s because I don’t know where to I should advance myself to. I have achieved almost anything I wanted before I was 45 years old. There is almost nothing that I miss. The title “professor” would be nice. Probably a matter of two or three more years of work. But I don’t like the idea of standing in front of bored 18 or 19 year old students who rather tweet on their mobile phones than write down my formulae. So I leave that bit of my ambition for my next life…
