The GA death spiral is all those things and more.
Being a PP and aircraft owner involves being a tinkerer of machines. Which itself is a dying interest as more and more of the gizmos of daily living are not only “no user serviceable parts inside”, but increasingly “no user comprehendible parts inside”. A childhood & youth spent being incurious of the machines that surround you presages an adult life disinterested in anything that requires fussy fiddling.
That was one of the stated goals on the LSA regulations, but it didn’t really work. It opened the market up to some mostly eastern European small planes, but they are still 100-150k$ for something that has minimal performance.
The other stated goal was to convert all the two seat “ultralight trainers” that were being operated under part 103 in spite not coming near the specifications for that class. That didn’t happen, the whole class just vanished leaving there no real way to get training for a real part 103 ultralight.
Homebuilts are what is really the source for pretty much all current modest cost recreational planes. But it takes a special kinda of crazy to want to fly enough to build you’re own plane. I’ve done it and it isn’t a small task.
I still have the complete plans and manuals for a Van’s RV-6 that I planned to build many years ago, but never got to.
Building kits is not like it used to be, though. Quick-build kits are now common, and some manufacturers have programs where you buy a quick-build kit, then vacation at the factory for a few weeks while you build your plane there with the help of their equipment, jigs, and trained people.
Take that RV-6 I was going to build. Back then, the estimate for construction was 2,000 hours, but most people said it would take 3,000 or more. The RV-6 quick-build kit has the fuselage and wings skinned, the tanks sealed, everything primered, etc. About 800-1200 hours of work left, mostly installing the control surfaces, engine, avionics, interior and paint. But if you don’t want to do even that, ‘builder assist’ companies have formed and you can hire them to help you finish the aircraft. Some homebuilt manufacturers have taken to bringing in their customers to finish their aircraft in the factory.
All this tells us that homebuilts are no longer about the love of building airplanes, but a workaround to the completelty broken state of the modern certified light aircraft industry. Van’s aircraft alone has sold more kits in the past few years than Cessna has sold light airplanes in that time, and there are over 11,000 Van’s RVs flying today - more than many aircraft from the big manufacturers of old.
Another interesting fact: The heavy regulation of light aircraft was always sold as a
safety measure. But the homebuilt industry, which has very few regulations, has pretty much the same safety record despite the airplanes generally being higher performance and built in garages by people with no specific training in aircraft construction.
Perfectly said. It’s totally the aerial equivalent of the “riverboat” casino on a barge in a pond surrounded by a berm half a mile from a river that’s connected to the pond by a pipe.
Business and wannabe plane owners are defeating the bureaucracy by the least contorted means available. Which is horridly contorted.
None of which should be interpreted as me throwing shade on the airplane designs themselves. Just on the certification mess.
As to safety records, it’s perhaps worth remembering that in the immediately pre- and post- WW-II days one heck of a lot of accidents were down to aircraft design or construction. So all that regulation was a response to the problems of the day.
But it stagnated right through to today. Nowadays, the vast majority of GA accidents are caused by crappy piloting, not by airplanes falling apart in flight. With some exceptions for truly aged machines badly maintained in difficult environments.
So the fact 30yo Cessnas and 5yo RVs have about the same safety record isn’t too meaningful when substantially none of the accidents to either are mechanically caused. It is evidence the RVs are not obvious deathtraps by comparison to safe Cessnas. But when people keep are crashing them with CFIT, continued VFR flight into IMC, and fuel exhaustion at the rate they do, the actual number of non-human factors accidents is so tiny it’s hard to generate meaningful statistics from the small sample size.
Well, you could argue that that the Type Certificate and engineering certification process might not be necessary for safety, at least any more. We could ease up even more on aircraft regulations for non-commercial use with little or no change in safety. But it would make aviation more accessable and innovative.
Yes. I would definitely favor a much lighter form of results-based regulation for GA aircraft certification. Maybe, just maybe, the Feds will learn something from the coming e-VTOL revolution.
Love the “Riverboat” Casino analogy, extremely apt. Matches most of the new homebuilts out there. The old love to build type still exist, but they are a minority of the planes that get built.
The FAA does recognize the problem and is working on new “MOSAIC” standard. Been hearing it is right around the corner for several years now. Googling it today I see they’re saying August 2023. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Most of the speculation is that it will allow LSA style rules for bigger and faster planes. Maybe even my RV would be under the new rules (not that it matters to me, already flying under BasicMed.)
I think the only way to get airline levels of safety in GA would be to have airline style currency and operational rules. Which would drive the cost up so high as to kill GA off almost entirely.
You fly an RV? Does it look like this?
I was unaware of the MOSAIC effort. Just not my department any more. Thanks for the ref; I’ll be reading up later.
After a couple decades of diligent effort by the FAA and the repair station trade groups to update the regs and policy guidance that apply to repair stations, the Feds recently unveiled the revised rules. Which make almost everything worse, not better, that the industry had been fighting for and about all that time. There are none so blind …
I just hope the Feds won’t do the same “helpful” stuff to GA certification.
No, more like this: RV-8 / 8A - Van's Aircraft Total Performance RV Kit Planes
Even cooler!
Yes. Now that is a cool toy.
A part of me really wishes there was some origination that could keep a 707 or similar plane from that era airworthy, and would tour around the country offering “experience” flights like the EAA does with their Ford Trimotors. But I also recognize that old jets are probably an order of magnitude more complicated than those WWII birds, and astronomically expensive to operate.
There are groups like that for especially historical transport aircraft, like the Lockheed Constellation. And there are still lots of old jets flying. The 707, for example, has had upgrades to turbofan engines and the military still flies about 40 of them. Until recently, John Travolta flew a 707.
Most old jets are retired not because the airframe timed out, but because the old jets just aren’t as efficient and cost too much to fly. For example, 747s have been taken out of service because of cost of operation - even ones only a few years old. I read about one that had been scrapped after only having been flown a handful of times.
USAF’s 707s are headed for the scrap heap as fast as they can move their rather bespoke mission systems to other airplanes. They’re falling apart at the seams. Not so much the structure itself, although that is an issue too, but the availability of genuine replacement parts for every gizmo on the airframe and inside the engines.
It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s Stone Age tech nobody has manufactured in 40+ years, if not 50.
Not quite GA news, but similar to other bad-news posts farther upthread. Here’s one of many articles all telling the same story with a very clear punchline but very few details. …
Appears a baggage tug or pickup truck ran headlong into a jetbridge base. Which pretty well approximates an immovable object. Seatbelt use by ramp crew industry-wide is pretty non-existent. Whether the worker was directly crunched in the collision or ended up underneath something heavy hasn’t been publicly released that I could find.
Either way, a grim reminder that with tens of thousands of people at various locations working for a few dozen companies but all of them under time pressure while using big heavy equipment, it doesn’t take but a little inattention or maybe equipment malfunction to have a pretty serious outcome.
Good luck to your family whoever you are.
What’s the top speed of those things (the tugs specifically)? And are they governed?
They don’t look to go more than about 15 mph in my limited observation. But maybe they go way faster in some cases. I guess they might have to travel pretty long distances at some airports and get going pretty fast.
I don’t know any book numbers.
But yeah, baggage tugs often have to travel quite a distance at large airports. I’ve seen tugs doing what looks like about 20-25mph when on a road away from the immediate gate area where speeds are supposed to be kept slow. The tugs are geared low and have a lot of torque to get a heavy baggage train moving. If running solo or towing just one empty, they can go from zero to 15-20 in next to no distance = high jerk & high acceleration. A pedal mistake or mistakenly cranked steering then mash the throttle and they could have been in the shit all but instantly. The interior of these things have zero crashworthiness beyond maybe a seatbelt. All hard metal surfaces, a non-collapsing steering column and steel steering wheel, no crumple zones, etc.
A jetbridge base also has a bunch of protruding gizmos to impale or shred oneself on. Or one might try to drive under something with insufficient overhead clearance and either decapitate yourself or crumple the roof and/or windshield frame into your face. Or just fall out during a trivial crash and end up with the tug lying on its side on your torso. They are ballasted for traction with heavy push plates on each end for durability and are much heavier than their tiny size might suggest.
Of course if the “ramp vehicle” was an ordinary van or pickup truck then it’d be capable of ordinary automobile speeds and accelerations. But also have typical automotive crash worthiness features.
About 20 years ago my then-base had an aircraft push tug back over one of the other crewmen on foot. Those tugs weigh 80 to 100K lbs. Like more than a fully loaded highway tractor + semi-trailer rig. But all the weight is concentrated in 4 tires, not spread over 18. It went about like Wile E. Coyote and the proverbial Acme steamroller. The tug driver never got over that one, although it really wasn’t his fault.
Be careful out there.
My previous career was as a firefighter at an air carrier airport. One of the many motor vehicle accidents I responded to on the ramp side was a baggage tug that drove into a bollard coming out of one of the bag rooms. The driver (not restrained) was ejected over the hood, thrown about 25 feet, and had a depressed skull fracture, amongst other substantial issues.
Even if they can’t go “fast” they certainly can go “fast enough.”
Plenty of GSE accidents. Stair truck trying to drive under the terminal and adding a new back entrance to one of the Dunkin Donuts. Belt loader knocked over when a jetbridge pushed off from an aircraft (belt loader to put gate checked carryons back upstairs). Baggage cart against the tank of a fuel truck, slicing the tank open. Belt loader vs fuel truck. MD88 pushed back into a catering truck (the truck had the slice from the wing in the box for like the next 10 years, covered in tape). Tug slipped on ice during a pushback and ended up in the left engine. And more blue juice spills you could imagine.
How more ramp folks aren’t hurt or killed has always amazed me.
I have no aircraft expertise like many in this thread but just had to share this article I’ve been reading:
Surely you could put dozens of drones on an aircraft now, and indeed the US has been looking into it with a program called ‘Gremlins’ which is a great name for anything.