Reviving General Aviation

Karoliina Salminen wrote about a revival for general aviation. These are some of my thoughts on the subject.

As Karoliina wrote, "general aviation is starving". What would be needed to revive it to the former glory? First of all we need to establish the purposes of general aviation and secondly we need to think how it could better fulfill these purposes. General aviation serves mainly two purposes: transport and entertainment. There are also other purposes such as emergency and research operations but I won't go into them here. I argue that general aviation can't compete very well as a form of entertainment. There are a couple of reasons. Firstly we live in a very entertainment focused society and there exists other forms of entertainment with much better cost to entertainment value than aviation. Computer games offer non-stop interaction in imaginary worlds with very low price. Secondly we live in postmodern times. At least part of the entertainment value in general aviation consists of the coolness of being able to fly at all. As long as man has lived he has dreamed of being able to fly like a bird. In the 20th century this was finally possible (balloons are aircrafts but not like birds). To think that it is cool for mankind to be able to fly is a modern thought. It belongs to same category with admiring moon landings. However the time for general public to think like this has long been in the past. Nowadays it's all about your personal feelings, that is, postmodernism. You value your experiences in the light of how they make you feel. Being able to fly doesn't have any value in itself. Only if gives you great feelings it will be valued and even then it will be compared to other activities and how they make you feel. This is of course a generalization. There still exists people who think it is cool to be able to fly. But this means that general aviation being relatively expensive and not cool and worth pursuing because of itself can't compete with other forms of entertainment in it's present state among general public. That leaves transport as a purpose for general aviation.

CAFE foundation advocates general aviation as a popular means of transportation in the future. In order for general aviation to be a viable alternative as a means of transport when compared to cars several things have to happen. It needs to be faster, that is, the time from door to door needs to be smaller. It needs to be cheaper (both the initial investment and the operational costs). It needs to be easier (getting the pilot's license and the general bureaucracy). The CAFE foundation addresses these requirements. I have the following thoughts.

The idea which CAFE foundation advocates is that people would have personal air vehicles (PAV). Roughly it is an aircraft equivalent to a family car. Nowadays small aeroplanes are quite expensive. A four-seat basic aeroplane costs somewhere around 250,000 $ new where as family car can be 20,000 $. There's one magnitude of difference. I don't know the specifics of aeroplane manufacturing but one thing is clear. Cars are produced in far larger numbers. If small aeroplanes were mass produced in a similar scale as cars are, the price would fall dramatically. This of course will probably never happen. However, the trend is that the price gap between mass produced products and little produced products is diminishing. Some examples: 3d-printing can produce complex one off products with a price soon comparable to mass production. An example would be a flute which was printed in one run, required no assembly and was playable. Silicon chip making: If a small company wants to make a chip, it rents factory time from a bigger company instead of building it's own factory. The production numbers still have to be large, but they can much smaller than they would have to be if the company would have to build it's own factory. My vision is that in the future personal air vehicles can be manufactured in small series in a general purpose factory totally automatically. The individual price would be comparable to massive mass production.

The operation costs would also have to be reduced. This means better fuel efficiency. Electric planes are also an alternative.

The CAFE foundation advocates a model where there would be a lot of small airfields so there would be only small distance from point of departure to the airport and from airport to the destination. This would also mean a new kind air traffic control system. So the whole system would change quite a bit. This kind of new system would not be easily welcomed by for example European Union. The existing system and bureaucracy are heavy and the fear of leap to the unknown is too large. Instead the new system should be tested in some fast developing country where the existing system wouldn't be too big and where general aviation has a lot to offer because the existing road network isn't as good as it is in the western countries. China and India are already choking to car traffic because of the rapid growth in automobile count and the road network can't cope with them or expand fast enough.