Comments on: General Aviation Won’t Find Future Pilots in Rear View Mirror

By: Dead Air

Dead Air — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:32:14 +0000

I have been flying for 32 years.
In the 70s, I thought $27.00 per hour for a new C-150 with instructor was a lot of money.
Today they want $175.00 per hour for a 2 seater single with an instructor.
Where I live, it takes about 60 hours to train a Private Pilot….$10,675 by the time your done.
Only the rich kids are learning to fly but not going on to be ATPs and instructors.
Most students are middle age and just learning to fly for fun.

My airport had about 625 planes based there in 1980 and now hovers a little over 100…if that. I even see planes rotting in their flat tires. Planes that have not moved in years and years.

There has been an 86% increase in training cost and 100% increase in fuel prices in my county.

Wages have not really met any of those percentile increases for anyone in the middle class. They are only going down right now.

There are not too many smart kids that I know who want to spend $100,000 (plus interest)for a degree and flying rating just to come out on the street and make less than minimum wages in Chicago or East coast to be a flight instructor.
Kids are becoming accountants and business pro’s.

After years of flying, I was hired by a well known regional airline at under $19,000 a year.
And that is what the wages were frozen at for at least a year.
At the time, they hired kids with 600hrs total time to fly CRJs. They did not work out.

I think what you will see in the future will be foreign pilots taking american pilot jobs.
They get trained fairly well and will fly for food and live in numbers in a box.

The product liability problelms of the 1980s are now taking its toll.

I wonder if there will be an aviation economic crash like what happened to housing on the horizon?

Well, it’s just my opinion.

By: Becoming a Pilot: Is it a Relevant Choice? - Jetwhine: Aviation Buzz and Bold Opinion

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 03:59:03 +0000

[...] knows how many quit before they got their student certificate, typically just before solo. (See General Aviation Won’t Find Future Pilots in Rear View Mirror.) An anecdotal presolo dropout guesstimation is 50 to 80 percent, so adding that to the [...]

By: Hope & Cynicism for EAA’s Learn-to-Fly Day | RENT-A-PLANE

Hope & Cynicism for EAA’s Learn-to-Fly Day | RENT-A-PLANE — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 03:40:56 +0000

[...] Curious about its whereabouts, Google took me to its website not long ago, just before the first press release arrived in my inbox. What I learned about International Learn-to-Fly Day did not neutralize my cynicism, but it did give me a ray of hope that disparity between the acquisition investment and results would be small because they are not looking in the rearview mirror. [...]

By: Hope & Cynicism for EAA’s Learn-to-Fly Day - Jetwhine: Aviation Buzz and Bold Opinion

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:52:51 +0000

By: david comeau

david comeau — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:05:05 +0000

Degeneration of our general aviation interests in world wide has cause for great concern. Will we in North America understand consequences of sitting by and doing nothing.
There is at least one expanding nation with global foresight. They are having pilots trained here in Canada in unprecedented numbers. Sure our lazyness, lack of interest and diluted ambitions may have played heavily in the demise of what was once a fourishing industry.

By: Jeffrey Sigmon

Jeffrey Sigmon — Sat, 17 May 2008 18:31:55 +0000

With the cost of flight training sky rocketing, I believe most airlines will be forced to stop trawling and start dredging for pilots.

Something has to be done.