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It’s hard to overestimate the good that was done when the federal government reauthorized the FAA. The agency has for decades gone from one stop-gap funding bill to the next. With its long-term plan to fund the FAA, Congress said it got it. There’s important work for the FAA to do, including modernization and capacity improvement, and with its funding buttoned up for the next four years, it can focus on the real work.
But the biggest win of all wasn’t really a win but the dodging of what has been one of the two or three biggest threat to GA in our history, ATC privatization. With the defeat of the airlines’ takeover of air traffic control, we avoided being at the mercy of a historical enemy to GA. And as nice as the airlines said they would be to GA if they had gotten control of ATC, there was nothing in law to keep them from imposing their economic will on any other sector of aviation. That would have meant users fees, more restricted airspace, slot limitations for GA at airline airports and an end to the fuel tax, which has been a reliable source of funding for aviation as well as a fair one. It was a happy day at the alphabets when privatization’s chief supporter, Rep. Bill Shuster, R-PA, pulled the plug on the amendment.
Facing Off With Problems Ahead
We pilots know that general aviation faces a lot of challenges, some technological, others demographic and others still that are political. The technological ones we’re working on. Everybody wants cheaper, more efficient, cleaner and more reliable propulsion, and there are a lot of smart people working on just that. Admittedly, a lot of them are doing their work in sectors of transportation other than aviation. That said, if we wind up with lightweight, powerful, reliable and quickly rechargeable batteries developed for cars, who really thinks it will take longer than 10 minutes for that tech to makes its way to aviation?
Demographics are a stickier problem. The majority of active pilots are by overwhelming numbers older, male, white and at least somewhat affluent. That last one is hard to get around, but the other three shouldn’t be. There’s nothing inherent in aviation that would make it any less desirable for women, people of color or younger people than any other activity. But we’re not getting enough of any of those people hooked on aviation (an addiction I’m happy to spread) to make much difference in our numbers. Unless we do grow the ranks of pilots, light GA will suffer in terms of the cost of products (the fewer made, the more they cost), the availability of aircraft to fly, access to airports friendly to GA, and a loss of political clout.
Sometimes gains in one area translate into gains in another or a few others. The development of good batteries to support practical electric flight is a case in point. When that happens, the cost of flying will be greatly reduced—to hazard a guess, I think it could cut direct operating costs by 75 percent for light planes. And the gains could be just as much for larger planes, but the development of electric airliners is a tall order. An electric LSA-sized airplane is something we’re on the verge of pulling off already. And as much as I understand the attraction of hybrid power, eliminating the reciprocating part of any propulsion system is the key to cutting cost and complexity, the latter of which will ensure improved reliability. Now, if we can cut costs to that extent, we’re looking at making flying cheap enough that many of us will no longer have to do the calculus on making trips in our planes. If a fill-up in a Skylane is on the order of $300, well, a two-leg trip somewhere (remember, you need to fly back home, too) becomes a $1,200 expenditure. And that’s before you add in the other costs of ownership. For a lot of folks, that’s prohibitive.
But going back to that Skylane trip, if instead of $1,200, the cost was $300 for the round trip, that would change everything. At that lower cost, the trip isn’t just reasonable, it’s downright economical compared to the other options. Not to mention that the $100 hamburger would be a $25 hamburger. Expensive, but doable every weekend of the year, so long as you don’t get sick of hamburgers. I know we’re still a ways away from that kind of future, but I do believe we’ll get there, and I do believe that it will be within the 20 good years or so that many of us have left to fill out in our logbooks.
And the really great thing about aviation getting cheaper, apart from the obvious part that affordability is a good thing, is that more people, a lot more people, in fact, will be able to do it. With aviation, which is to a large degree a discretionary activity, cost is critical. People need to have health insurance, send their kids to college, and rent or buy a home, so they pay what they have to pay to make those things happen regardless of how painful it might be. But with few if any exceptions, people don’t need to own an airplane, even though, admittedly, it does feel that way sometimes. People instead want to own an airplane, or, in some cases, they can justify it business-wise. And with airplane pricing as it is right now, that locks a lot of people out of the market because they can’t justify the spending no matter how much they might want that plane.
If owning and operating a plane were a lot cheaper, it would change the essential value proposition. We see it today in the automotive world. People don’t need to spend $25,000 on a new car. There are cheaper options. But the point is that they can spend that much money (and more) for a new set of wheels, so they do, especially given that it’s not that expensive to operate a car, all things considered. With a plane, there’s not as much use or utility as with a car, so the cost calculus is even tougher. It’s also a much more maintenance-intensive product than a car, and the cost of the fuel to go flying is on the order of twice as expensive for far worse fuel efficiency.
If we could cut the cost of propulsion and direct operating costs, and lower the cost of new planes in the process, I’m confident we’d see an explosion in interest in flying that would help spread the love far and wide beyond our current club, which I think we’d all agree is getting way too cozy.
