jerry-hansen(at)cox.net
Guest
|
 Posted: Sun May 13, 2007 5:07 pm Post subject: Where's the answer? |
 |
|
Where’s the answer? Most people won’t build…..
--------------------------------------------- Up, Up and ... Never Mind
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Smoketown, Pa.
MATTHEW W. PHELPS was a natural candidate for flying lessons. A computer
system administrator, he liked anything technical. He had a brother who had a
plane and wrote about aviation for a magazine. And from the moment he got
behind the controls, at a small airport north of Boston, he enjoyed himself.
“I liked it a lot,” he said. “It was fun, it was exhilarating.”
But Mr. Phelps, 42, embodies all the promise and crisis of general aviation. He
gave up after 15 hours of lessons, probably about a quarter of the way to
earning his license.
“At that point, I’d met my future wife and we were starting to save for the
wedding, and then to buy a house, and then there was something else to save
money for,” he said. That was in 1993. “I’m still sort of dreaming that it might
get done, I just put it on hold,” he said.
Once, nearly every boy had the idea that he would slip the surly bonds of earth
and dance the skies on laughter-silvered wings, as John Gillespie Magee Jr., a
pilot in the Canadian Air Force, wrote in 1941. Plenty of people still go to school
hoping for a job at the airlines flying the big jets, but experts fear that the
hobbyist, who flies as an alternative to golf or boating, or perhaps to take the
family 100 miles to a beach or maybe just an obscure restaurant, is
disappearing.
The number of student pilots is down by about a third since 1990, from 129,000
to 88,000. The number of private pilots is down from 299,000 to 236,000,
according to statistics kept by the Federal Aviation Administration. And they are
aging.
Some longtime private pilots fear that an industry is withering, and a bit of
Americana is slipping away, along with a bit of freedom and joy. And it is
happening in part because of lack of interest; Walter Mitty doesn’t want to fly
anymore.
The industry has recently launched a major campaign to lure people like Mr.
Phelps back, and to recruit new students. But something has changed.
“It’s not a Gen X kind of thing,” said Paul Quinn, 62, with a smile, as he fueled
up his 1942-vintage Army Air Corps trainer at the tiny airport in Smoketown, Pa.
Sitting at the picnic tables overlooking the single runway, a variety of students,
pilots and sightseers had gathered in the warm sun. Most, like Mr. Quinn, had
gray hair. “Most of the people who are out here are in their 50s, 60s, 70s and
80s,” he said.
Ironically, an increasingly technological society is turning its back on a high-
technology pastime.
One problem is fear, in an era when people describe their cars by the number of
airbags, not the number of horses. In small planes, the statistics show that fatal
accidents per 100,000 hours of flight fell by one-quarter in the decade ending in
2004, but some people in aviation fear that tolerance for risk is falling even
faster.
ANOTHER is the shift of income and family decision-making to women. Industry
leaders try hard not to sound like a former president of Harvard and attribute
anything to innate skill, but women simply do not take up flying as frequently as
men do.
“There’s been a big sociological and psychological change in the families of
today, in where the discretionary dollars go,” said Phil Boyer, president of the
Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. When the husband told the stay-at-home
mom of the 1950s that he was going to spend a Saturday afternoon taking flying
lessons, she acquiesced, he said. Today, he said, in a two-income family, she is
more likely to say: “You are not. That’s your day to take Johnny to the soccer
game, and what the heck are you doing spending our hard-earned money on
flying lessons?”
Mr. Boyer’s association is trying hard to make flying more appealing to women,
including offering training in how to read aviation maps, talk on the radio and
provide other help in the plane, and maybe transitioning them to earning a
license themselves. But 95 percent of the students are still male, he said.
At the airport in Smoketown, Matt Kauffman, the chief flight instructor at Aero-
Tech Services, the only flight school here, said that the training system had not
adapted itself to women. “Women learn differently from men,” Mr. Kauffman
said. “If two men go up, they will scream and shout, and a transfer of knowledge
occurs, and we’d get back on the ground and go have a beer, and life is good,”
he said. “If you yell at a woman, she’d start crying, and she’d never come back.”
He would like to hire a female flight instructor but can’t find one, he said.
Time and money drive others away. The prospect of taking months to earn a
pilot’s license is less appealing now. It is also expensive, $5,000 to $7,000.
Renting even a tiny two-seat plane runs $75 an hour, and an instructor, $40 an
hour or so. Fuel costs money, too, but its recent price increase is not a major
consideration, because small planes burn only six to seven gallons an hour.
David Ehrenstein got his pilot’s license in graduate school in the early 1990s, at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I’m a little bit of a closet technie
nerd,” he said. He liked flying because “there’s a bunch of technology involved,”
and that using it “to do this great cool thing was exciting.” But he had to give it
up when he moved to Washington about three years later.
“My impression is that when people grow up and have kids, they no longer have
time to fly,” said Mr. Ehrenstein, now 40. “When I quit, the major demographic
of pilots was retired white guys.”
Even people with money find flying a guilty pleasure. Ron Janis, a lawyer in New
York who specializes in mergers and acquisitions, wants his license so he can fly
to a house he and his wife bought in Provincetown, Mass. And he loves to fly.
But, he said: “I certainly work longer hours than when I started. And I do get in
trouble with my firm for taking this time off” to fly.
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did not help, nor did the crash deaths of
prominent private pilots like Cory Lidle or John F. Kennedy Jr. Nor did the bumbling
flight of two men from Smoketown into the District of Columbia in May 2005, in a
two-seat Cessna, that paralyzed the federal government.
“We’ll be paying for that for years,” said Mr. Kauffman, the flight instructor. (The
men were not his students and it was not his plane, he quickly pointed out.) Mr.
Kauffman said his business has held constant, mostly because his only
competitor went out of business last year.
Indeed, airports like this one show signs of stagnation. At any general aviation
airport, the cars in the parking lot are usually new but the planes on the field
have vintages more like the taxis in Havana. They are all well maintained, some
private pilots say, but carburetors are still in common use.
Vern Raburn, the president and chief executive of Eclipse Aviation, which is
seeking to sell a new generation of tiny jets for general aviation use, observed in
a speech that the Beechcraft Bonanza is now 60 years old. “I challenge you to
find another industry in the world today that celebrates building 60-year-old
products,” he said.
But Mr. Raburn’s product costs over $1.5 million, and thus is not likely to
revitalize the lower end of the spectrum.
Some industry executives say the reason is that America is no longer a do-it-
yourself, take-charge society, and that includes fly-it-yourself. Mr. Boyer’s group,
the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, tried putting ads on the cable TV
channels that run do-it-yourself home improvement and electronics programs.
The campaign did not work very well, he said. Now his organization has a new
marketing campaign, Project Pilot, with a smoothly produced video narrated by
Erik Lindbergh, grandson of Charles, who flew the Atlantic solo in 1927 and
electrified the world of aviation.
“It gives me a rush every time I go up,” he says on the DVD. But he adds: “Just
as my grandfather’s flight created a huge interest in flying, we need to create
that same groundswell today. We need a new generation of general aviation
pilots, because without more pilots, even A.O.P.A. can’t keep general aviation
strong, and that will ultimately have a big effect on every pilot.”
BUT some veterans fear the magic is gone for good. Men who returned from
World War II having seen the Mustangs, Corsairs or Thunderbolts might have
wanted to fly their own propeller planes. In the wars in the Middle East, the A-10
Warthog has not inspired the same ambitions.
The F.A.A. last year introduced a new kind of license, sport pilot, to try to lower
the barriers to entry and draw more people in. The license limits the pilot to very
small planes, and, at first, daytime flying, and staying within 50 miles. It also
requires fewer hours, and costs about half as much to get.
Many flight instructors say the license is so limited that there is no reason to
bother. Hal Shevers, who owns a flight school near Cincinnati, is pushing his
students to get the license. With it, he said, “I can take my mom and dad or wife
and kids up on a nice afternoon or sunny Sunday, and show them the sights.”
“I can show them a sunset, a sunrise.”
But to work, some people in the industry say, it will require a major
manufacturer to build a new class of plane, one that can be sold for less than
$100,000, and insured for less, so it will be less expensive to rent.
To be able to offer cut-rate prices for the new sport license, Mr. Kauffman went
looking for a small, simple, inexpensive airplane. He ended up with an Aeronca
Champion, which was built in 1946. So far, nobody is building a new plane to
match the F.A.A.’s program.
[quote][b]
| | - The Matronics RV-List Email Forum - | | | Use the List Feature Navigator to browse the many List utilities available such as the Email Subscriptions page, Archive Search & Download, 7-Day Browse, Chat, FAQ, Photoshare, and much more:
http://www.matronics.com/Navigator?RV-List |
|
|
|
Get Email Distribution Too!
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
