I believe the most-produced homebuild is the Van’s RV-6. Over 2000 of them are currently flying, so I imagine the number of kits produced is considerably higher. Great airplane.
As for the cost of aviation, a number of factors contributed:
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Because of the way airplanes are maintained, used ones can be just about as good as new ones. So as more airplanes were made, they created their own competition in the form of an increasingly large used aircraft market.
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Product liability plays a part, but not as big as some think. The incremental costs of increased liability insurance did make new airplanes less competitive against the large used fleet, but that’s just one contributing factor.
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Type certification rules and regulations made it extremely hard to innovate. It’s just too expensive to make the kinds of annual incremental changes that autos can make, which again makes it harder for new aircraft to compete against used models.
The result of these factors was rapidly diminishing economies of scale. You can sell an aircraft a lot more cheaply if you can amortize your fixed costs and R&D over annual sales of 10,000 units than you can over annual sales of 200 units. As the number of aircraft produced declined, their unit cost necessarily had to go up. This also makes it even harder for aircraft companies to innovate - it’s difficult to recoup your investment in R&D and certification if you can only sell 200 planes a year.
The result as been a diminishing spiral of production efficiency, and that’s the real culprit. Product liability is part of it, but the real culprit is the large market of used aircraft that are just as good as the new ones. So the market has slowly changed - new planes are extremely expensive and purchased by wealthy people, but where there is a huge used marketplace of affordable aircraft where all the action is.
The real victim in all this is innovation. The pace of innovation in general aviation has been dreadful. The engine in a 1990 Skyhawk is essentially the same engine you would have found in a 1950’s version of the same airplane. Porsche tried to get in the engine game and failed because it was too expensive.
A lot of the innovation has actually come from homebuilt aircraft. The new Cessna low wing planes owe a lot to the development of composites for homebuilt use, and the development of new airframes by Glasair, Lancair, and other homebuilt manufacturers. The smaller Rotax engines were proven out in the homebuilt field where they didn’t have to be regulated.
If you want to revitalize aviation, product liability is only one part of it. You need to streamline certification procedures (which is happening under the VLA rules). I imagine that if you could wave a magic wand and destroy the used fleet (hey, cash for clunkers!), you’d create a robust new aircraft market - for a while, until a new used fleet developed.
But financially, this all isn’t that bad. Forget the price of new airplanes - the question is really whether a person of a normal middle class income can still fly. The answer is yes. A reasonable used 172 doesn’t cost any more to own than a low-end luxury car like a Lexus. The initial purchase cost may be higher, but the depreciation will be much lower.
I bought a 1974 Grumman AA1 in 1993 for $13,000. I sold it in 2001 for 11,500. I lost $1500 in 8 years to depreciation, and that’s because of the increased engine time. The airframe itself actually went up in value significantly. Had I held on to that airplane, I would have made money on it, because the same plane today is worth over $20,000 in the local market.
I could have bought a new car for $13,000, but after 8 years it would be worth close to zero. The airplane was much cheaper to own. Insurance was much less as well. Annual inspections (owner assisted) ran me about $300-$600 per year, and I paid $40/mo for a tie-down.
Aviation is still affordable. However, it’s becoming more difficult due to increased rules and regulations. That’s going to kill it faster than the cost of new airplanes. After that mid-air in New York last week, the yahoos in Congress are talking about requiring every aircraft to have collision-avoidance equipment installed. I doubt if that will happen because it’s such a stupid idea, but it’s that kind of nonsense (and the security rules stemming from 9-11) that are going to kill general aviation.
