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This forum was an entertaining read.. I got my license at 17 in the 70's at a small airport in Cincinnati, my main instructor was a wonderful elf of a lady from KY, who incidently got het FAA examiners license during my training and gave me my checkride. (under the hood from 500ft AGL to short final...interesting). My recollections of the time remain as the best of times. The old 3000 ft grass strip is now a taxiway for a 3500 ft asphalt runway. Dads old '56 182 is long since sold and I recently renewed flying here in CO at, again, a relatively small airport where I was attracted by, for lack of a better reason, familiar smells, old pilots, open hangars and lots of plane talk. Just like old times.
Flying is fun and to a certain extent glamorous, but these fade with the reality that it costs a lot. Flight for business and profit helps attenuate the costs for some, but for the day/vfr rec pilot type, it becomes a prohibitively expensive "hobby". I don't know how much of a new plane's cost covers the manufacturers liability, I am confident that it is significant. When the VFR pilot flys into a cold front and kills himself, then the family sues the builder and WINS, can we blame the builders for tacking the risk on the cost of the airframe? Could you see Ford doing well as a family car if the cost of their Taurus' engine was $25000 like a Lycombing? Many factors, including liability and regulation crank up the costs of flying, and the idea of flying being in the reach of everyone is unrealistic, and perhaps undesirable.After all, if folks are going to take their driving habits into an airport environment, it could get scary. Perhaps it's a good thing that the expense of flying, even at the recreational level, makes folks thing long and hard about it.
More so than driving a car, flying is a lot more than "just a fun thing to do". It's expensive and demanding of skills. Until I can afford to fly regularly (a.k.a. safely), I can't confidently say I will continue flying at all. But that costs money, which matters to all of us.
I have bookmarked this site, might even buy a plane, or, more realistically, join a club to lower the cost a bit.
GA is alive and dong fine. I just think the idea of getting everyone flying is a bit optomistic and perhaps unrealistic...
Safe flying to all
Dave
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