I like to browse airplane ads. (The SO said, ‘Why don’t you just sell all of your stuff and buy one already?’) One thing I notice about '70s Cessna 172s is that many of them have 10,000 hours or more. But '60s-vintage ones tend to only have a couple thousand hours on them. One would think that older airplanes would have the higher number of hours. I have a hypothesis and would like to see if anyone agrees or if I’m completely wrong.
Up until the '80s there were thousands of airplanes being made. IIRC the peak was reached in the late-1970s when something like 15,000 planes were being made in a year.
When I was growing up my mom worked for Gibbs Flight Service in San Diego. Most of the aircraft there seemed pretty new. One, N6228T, was eight years old when it crashed, and it was so ‘old’ that they called it ‘Shaky Jake’. Dad bought his first plane there when it was six years old with a couple thousand hours on it. It had been used as a traffic plane for a local radio station and was considered a bit long in the tooth. It seems that during that time flight schools and others – at least in metropolitan areas – would sell their old planes and buy new ones when they were ‘old’. Good business at the time. Pilots liked to fly new aircraft with that ‘new plane smell’.
I posted a table of Cessna 172 prices in The Great Ongoing General Aviation Thread. I graphed it yesterday, and the curve is parabolic. With prices the way they are, people just can’t afford airplanes anymore. Up until the airplane manufacturers stopped making piston singles, the price increases were gradual. After the long hiatus (11 years in the case of Cessna) the prices skyrocketed.
So here’s my hypothesis: Airplanes are often bought by flight schools, which use them for training. Consumers tend to buy used airplanes, often from flight schools. Private owners put fewer hours on their planes than flight schools do. In the '60s and early-'70s, flight schools kept their aircraft for a shorter time, and thus they had fewer hours when they were sold. When The Great General Aviation Collapse happened, flight schools using Cessnas were equipped primarily with N-model Skyhawks. (I think that is the most-produced model.) Since no new Skyhawks were being built, flight schools held onto the ones they had. Those airplanes racked up five-figure hours, and are still being used by flight schools. So '60s airplanes have fewer hours on them because they were turned over more frequently, and mid-to-late='70s models have more hours on them because they are retained in commercial service longer.
Am I close? Or entirely off base?
