I loved the Cherokee 140. I much prefer the overhead trim to that tinker-toy version in the Warrior that’s between the seats. You can’t tell where the trim is without taking your eyes off approach. The overhead crank makes it so much easier to set a specific trim level.
General aviation can be done on a reasonably small budget, accepting that nothing in aviation is cheap…
Grumman AA1’s are available for under 20K with decent time left on the engine. Cessna 172’s are available in the $35,000-$45,000 range.
The problem with the industry is the price of new aircraft, whixh have gone insane. But there’s a huge and thriving used market of planes that are just as affordable as they were back when they were built, which is roughly the price of a decent car or a luxury car.
We bought our AA1 for $13,000, flew it for nine years for the cost of gas and oil and annual inspections, and then sold it for $11,000. That’s about the cheapest flying you could do. But we got lucky. We dodged a few very expensive AD’s. There was one on the crankshaft of the O-235 that missed us by just a few serial numbers. That one was an automatic pull, inspection, and possible replacement of the crankshaft. It probably would have been close to ten grand.
But if you just dream of owning a 172 and doing some mild travel and eating a lot of $100 hamburgers, that’s still pretty affordable.
The new generation of LSA planes are more expensive than that, but still within range of the upper middle class.
I made this graph several years ago.
From the introduction of the Cessna 172 in 1957 through the 1970s, the price of the aircraft increased in a linear fashion with the median wage. I’d have to do some digging, but I think the price remained about twice the median wage for a couple of decades. There was a jump in price around 1979 or 1980, but after the jump the price increases remained linear – until The Hiatus, when there was a decade of very low production. When the General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994 was passed, removing many of manufacturers’ liability concerns, airplanes started being made again. But at this point the prices (as illustrated by the venerable 172 Skyhawk) started rising hyperbolically while the median wage continued to rise in a linear fashion.
Old airplanes are just as good as new airplanes, and manufacturers were competing with their own products. ISTM that in the '60s and '70s people would reach TBO, maybe overhaul once, and then buy a new plane when the old one reached TBO again. I think that when manufacturers stopped manufacturing for eleven years, General Aviation fell out of the public consciousness. Since airplanes were now a ‘boutique’ product, they became to expensive. When your target market can’t afford your prices, you don’t have a market. 
The collapse of middle class wages is a lot of the story too.
If we’d never invented microelectronics and if China was still hard core insular Commie, we’d have already had our revolution in this country.
That raises an interesting question. Does the median income reflect the rising income of the middle class? Or does the enormous wage inequality over the past couple/few decades skew the slope?
The bottom line as I see it is this: Until 1984, a brand-new airplane specifically designed for, and marketed to the middle class was within reach of anyone in the target market who had the desire to own one. Now they are only within reach of the wealthy.
I know I’ve posted this before, but during The Hiatus there was an explosion of information technology. With cable television, the Internet, cell phones, and so forth (and also non-virtual recreational activities such as quad-runners and personal watercraft), there are so many things people can do too amuse themselves that are much cheaper than flying, that personal flying just isn’t on people’s radar.
I tend to agree with this. The Millennial purchasing demographic is decidedly different from Baby Boomers.
Holy crap, $375K for a Cessna 172?
For that kind of money I’d intuitively expect something like a turboprop with a pressurized cabin. Yeah, yeah, I know. A single engine turboprop starts at around $2.5 million and is nearly $6 million for a Pilatus PC-12. Which only goes to show how ridiculous GA costs are these days. The PC-12 is certainly a highly capable airplane in terms of range, speed, and service ceiling, but to the layman it looks just like a “single engine private plane”.
I have sources for all of those prices. I just tried to pull up the documents with the footnotes, but apparently they didn’t make it from my old computer to this one. This isn’t the first time I’ve opened a folder on this computer and found it empty.
In any case, you can see by the graph that the cost of a Skyhawk was historically about twice the median wage. So today, a new Skyhawk should cost around $130,000.
what they need is a radical new way to make the 172 cheaper that is backwards compatible and cheap to certify. Imagine a composite wing and fuselage that can be bolted up to older 172’s.
This reminds me of an open forum discussion at Oshkosh years ago between Burt Ratan and a bunch of aircraft manufacturers. He verbally excoriated them for failing to realize the need for entry level aircraft people could afford. To paraphrase his position, without planes people can afford the future aviation as it was known in the 20th century is dead.
I’d hate to see this because I think it’s important to have airline pilots who worked their way up learning how to really fly. There’s no practical way to train someone from the ground up and expect them to have the skills that are learned over time.
It’s the difference between the Gimli Glider/landing on the Hudson and emergencies that didn’t end well.
I’m in your camp, but can’t dismiss the counter argument: that increasingly sophisticated autopilot systems should do most of (all?) the airline flying, with pilots relegated to the role of system monitors. You might have to write off the Gimli Glider and US Airways 1549 in return for routine completion of Air France 447 and a bunch of other flights where pilot actions caused the crash.
[nitpick]Rutan[/nitpick]
I don’t see how GA aircraft ownership affects this? Pilots can work their way up by training on modern trainer aircraft, then progress to instructing on said aircraft (not the way I think it should happen, but it does), then progress to charter flying, then small airline, big airline. There’s plenty of opportunity to gain skills along the way and none of it would be affected by the absence of an affordable C172.
If the planes aren’t purchased by GA then the production cost per plane goes up which drives up all flying costs.
IMO there’s no substitute for hours logged over time where you learn to make real decisions.
I still remember jump seating on a flight where the Captain was asking the FO questions I thought were pretty basic and he wasn’t getting it. The questions seemed to be aimed at a broader knowledge of flying and not just text book stuff.
Modern pilots can train on other brands of aircraft though, they don’t need to be flying the type of aircraft a private pilot would fly.
I agree, but you don’t need to be flying private aircraft, you get the experience flying charter.
Replace the wing and fuselage? So you’d be jacking up the engine and pulling a new airplane underneath it? I don’t think you’d get away with an STC for that… (-:
But they already have that, in a way. The Light Sport Aircraft category was an attempt by the FAA to reduce regulations on small private aircraft. Cessna has the Skycatcher, an LSA that looks like a traditiinal high wing Cessna, uses an O-200 Continental engine like the Cessna 150, but flies faster, has more range, higher service ceiling, etc. They are just over $100,000.
You could theoretically build a new wing for a 172, and maybe even get an STC to sell wing kits to other Cessna owners. But the wing isn’t the problem. Cessna 172’s are not sport machines, they’re the family sedan of the air. The wing isn’t designed for high performance, it’s designed for decent performance while allowing slow stall speeds, gentle stall recovery, and high strength. If you changed the wing to a cantilevered, laminar flow design you would then have a Cessna 177 Cardinal, which was intended to be the replacement for the 172 but failed in the marketplace because it was a hotter airplane to fly and bexause it was underpowered. The 172 has its charms, especially for pilots who do 't fly that frequently and need a safe, strong, docile airplane. I don’t think a 172 has ever broken up in flight, and they are super toleeant of bad landing technique. Perfect for your average recreational pilot.
The reason for the high cost of modern sportplanes comes down to the lack of economies of scale. So long as you are building only a few hundred aircraft per year, they’re never going to be cheap. We are looking at the end result of a decades long demand spiral.
But who needs a new factory aircraft? There are tens of thousands of used light aircraft out there, and a thriving marketplace. If you want an airplane with great performance for under $100,000 there are many to choose from. A Grumman Tiger can be had for $75K or so with a decent engine, and that plane will fly rings around a 172.
You can even get 80’s era Mooney M20s for under 100K. That’s a lot of airplane. Retracts, constant speed prop, turbo and oxygen in some, 180-210hp engines… I have a lot of hours in an old 60’s era Mooney with the Johnson-bar gear lever, and they are great flying planes. I just saw an ad for a 1980 M20K with a turbocharged engine for $97,000. That plane has a top speed of 231 mph and will cruise all day at 210.
The problem with the older planes, especially complex ones, is that operating costs can get expensive. You have to worry about the turbo, engine TBO, prop TBO, retract systems, etc. I’d probably budget at least $20/hr for a prop/engine overhaul fund.
If you don’t want an old plane, and you want something with more performance than an LSA plane will give you, you can buy new or used homebuilts. The Van’s RV series are fantastic aircraft. Thousands are flying, and three more join the fleet every two days. Van’s is producing more light aircraft today than just about any other manufacturer.
A quickbuild kit for an RV-7 is $39,000. put in $20k in avionics, maybe spend $10K on a half time O-320, and you’re in the air for $80k or so. Van’s also has an LSA fully built and certified RV-12iS you can buy outright for $75-$89K. That’s cheaper than the Cessna 172 was in its heyday, in constant dollars.
If I had my medical I’d be looking hard for a used RV-6 or RV-7, or perhaps a quickbuild kit.
I was just looking at that RV-12iS. If you can get away with 2 seats, that thing is an amazing value, even by the standards of the 1960’s and 1970’s when light aircraft were in their heyday.
This thing has a top speed of 144 mph, stalls at 47, can carry two 185lb adults, 20 gals of fuel and 50 lbs of baggage. has a ceiling of 17,000 ft, has a cabin 4" wider than a 150 (the same width as my Grumman, which was plenty for my 210 lb self and my wife). It has a range of 660 miles - much better than my Grumman or a Cessna 150,
The wings are removable so you can trailer the aircraft rather than pay for hangar space.
The thing can be had with a dual glass panel, can be IFR certified. You can buy the entire aircraft for between $75,000 and $89,000, depending on options. In 1969 the 172 Skyhawk sold for $13,995. In 2021 dollars that’s about $101,000. Granted it had four seats, but if you want a four seat Van’s plane it’s about the same price but with way more performance.
This airplane has only been out for a few years, and Van’s has already sold 1200 of them. Cheap aviation is still available - just don’t look for traditional aircraft manufacturers to provide it.
See? See?
Hey, if I had used 1974 instead of 1969 you would have been dead on. A 1974 Skyhawk would be 128,000 in current dollars. In the same year, a Lincoln Continental MK IV was $9800, That’s about $55,000 in today’s money, so a 172 cost about twice the cost of a luxury car of the time, and a decent LSA plane is about the same today. But new Cessna 172s and other ‘traditional’ airplanes from big legacy manufacturers have priced themselves way out of the market.
I think you’re missing my point. You need private aircraft purchase to keep the price of planes down for entry level training.
Yes, Vans has really come through with their line of aircraft. And IMO building one makes you a more knowledgeable / better rounded pilot.