Diamond DA-50 - 600,000$
Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about the poor financial health of general aviation in North-America. Basically, aviation is now the sole domain of the super-rich and there is no aviation middle class. These days, the price of an airplane is way beyond the mean of the middle class. Airplanes are too expensive (150,000$ to 600,000$ for a new Cessna, Cirrus or Diamond) and pilot license acquisition (15,000$ for a private pilot license with instrument rating) requires multiple years of personal investment.
The industry is pinning its hope on the growth and popularity of a new type of airplane called Light-sport aircraft (LSA). These airplanes are more affordable but limited in takeoff weight (1,320 pounds) and speed (120 knots). They are basically glorified ultralights, with all the limited safety and comfort that one can expect from lesser aircraft. Unfortunately, those that look like real airplanes cost between 150,000$ and 200,000. Still not cheap.
Cheaper Airplanes
Unfortunately, as long as there’s only 600,000 pilot license holders in a nation of 300 million, there’s no way Cessna, Piper, Diamond or Cirrus can charge less than 100,000$ for an airplane. There is simply no economy of scale. Unlike the automotive industry, airplanes have to be made by hand one at a time.
One way to reduce cost would be for manufacturers to move to mold-based composite airplanes and share the facilities amongst themselves. In computers, there’s a concept of “foundry“: a facility that only manufactures computer chips. Companies like Apple, IBM and nVidia do their designs by computer and send them to the foundry for manufacturing. This way, they only pay for hat they need and this results in lower-cost electronic devices because the design company didn’t have to own its own chip fabrication plant. The same could be done with composite airplanes and would provide a way to uniformly improve build quality.
Cheaper Training
Saving on training cost is a bit more difficult because it has a lot to do with practicing on real airplanes with a real experienced person. The only place we see is in the automation of ground schools using technology.
Luckily we live in a time where it is technologically possible to do most of the training virtually using desktop flight simulators. Glass cockpits are in fact computers and companies like Garmin are wise to provide software for people to train at home. Right now, it is possible to learn very technically difficult subjects such as mathematics, physics and video editing using online videos (see Khan Academy and Lynda.com). If one can learn second derivatives and sparse matrix solving from videos, there’s no reason someone could not learn how to fly too.
Conclusions
These are only two ideas, but GA has to move beyond older guys flying older avgas airplanes. Things started this way because many young people got into airplanes during WWII. We have to find a way to do the same today somehow.
