Going Direct: 20-Year Forecast: Here‘s What The FAA Missed

The FAA released its forecast for aviation over the next 20 years, and it's about as good a product as we can realistically hope to see. That is, it's based on the safest assumptions and fails to take into account advances in technology that will come and could transform GA. After all, if a forecast is really seeking to foresee the health of an industry off into the future, to the year 2038, in fact, it's fantasy not to include at least the observation that we simply don't know what technology will bring. And while we can guess, history tells us that our guesses are always way off.

I don't envy people tasked with creating forecasts for the long-term health of GA unless that forecast is for the continued reliability of the laws of physics on our aircraft. In the forecast, a link to which you can find at the end of this story, the FAA found that "The long-term outlook for general aviation is stable to optimistic, as growth at the high-end offsets continuing retirements at the traditional low end of the segment." Translated, that means that personal aviation will face challenges in the years ahead. It went on to conclude that "While the fleet remains level, the number of general aviation hours flown is projected to increase an average of 0.8 percent per year through 2038, as growth in turbine, rotorcraft, and experimental hours more than offset a decline in fixed wing piston hours."

There are a number of problems with this outlook. First, forecasting the size of the fleet to remain "level" is ludicrous. We live in a time when the vast majority of the GA fleet is composed of aircraft built between the early '60s and the late '70s. The youngest of those planes churned out over the course of two short decades is about 40 years old. The oldest is 60 years old. And in order to replace those aircraft, we're going to have to, if I can infer from the FAA's statement, add planes to the fleet at the same rate they're lost, retired or abandoned.

While this sentiment is hopeful, the truth is, in order for that to happen we're going to have to come up with a way to replace those planes more affordably, or it simply isn't going to happen. And as much as some of the existing fleet, even the septuagenarians among them, can be upgraded, the calculus behind the decision to do so is hard to reconcile, even with far less expensive retrofit avionics now a reality. Even with the great cost savings, few owners of a $30,000 airplane will spend $20,000 for that avionics upgrade, especially when regular engine and propeller maintenance is an ongoing cost concern. It's all too easy for an engine overhaul in a $25,000 Skyhawk to run $15,000.

Will new technology come to the rescue and help rejuvenate the fleet over the next 20 years? That is the essential question we should all, the FAA included, be asking ourselves, and probably asking it out loud.

The statement about how growth in Experimental planes, rotorcraft and turbines will make up for the decline in fixed wing GA hours might be onto something, though, that is if those "rotorcraft" hours the FAA refers to are amassed by electric powered quad copters, or something to that exotic effect. Those are the kinds of changes we need to see if we're going to see a thriving GA world in 2038.

Read the FAA Forecast Highlights.