This would be a very good idea in my opinion. This is one of the biggest factors, if not the outright biggest by a large margin, preventing more people from taking up aviation.

As a college student, pilot and aircraft owner I really feel the pain of expensive parts and, particularly, avionics capability. GPS approaches are fast replacing ILS just about everywhere but the largest airports with no thought to the fact that some of us simply cannot afford to drop $2k on even the cheapest, simplest form of IFR approach GPS. I can say for sure that I can build a high performance computer, liquid cooled, overclocked to 150-200% that can run any software reasonably purchasable anywhere and still have the $250 left over for a GPS receiver for my car, so there is no doubt that prices there are still unsustainable.

More relevant, however, is the fact that I have a good friend and roommate who is very interested in aviation but simply cannot afford (nor can his family) to get started. Seeing as his career choice is the music industry, it is likely he will never afford to – and that on an above average salary. I believe that as long as aviation is only available to the upper middle class or higher, we will never see pilot numbers grow.

Obviously, there are issues with lowering costs or it would have happened already. Safety cannot be sacrificed (nobody would rightly want that), and that costs – both in quality of materials and assembly labor. The low unit count amplifies the effect of R&D costs to high levels compared with cars, and that unit count will not be the first thing to change (prices must change first). That leaves the primary variable to be adjusted as R&D costs themselves.

One avenue of this is to lower the cost of FAA certification – you can see this in GPS receivers handily. The handhelds that are not certified are 1/10 the price of a certified unit which does the same thing. That is an unacceptable cost of doing business with the government that likely would not be tolerated in any other industry. Either removing unnecessary requires or lowering the time associated with some (which would have very little if any effect on the assurance of reliability) could help here.

Engine cost is another big issue as has been mentioned, and strikes repeatedly at existing owners with overhauls and other maintenance. It is true that these engines are tested and inspected far beyond an automotive engine before delivery and that adds cost. But anyone who tells me that it should multiply the cost by 10 for effectively the same product is simply lying or doesn’t know. Assuming the same materials used in construction (same price), less complexity (lower price) and extra testing and inspection (more added price), realistically we should be looking at something more like 2x the price, not 10x.

Hopefully there will be answers in the future. As an aerospace student I hope to do my part in helping with this most fundamental of problems in GA in the future, but it will likely need to be initiated by the FAA and not the industry – they have no room to wriggle free of their current structure with what the FAA gives them for the time being.

When you make something, you have fixed costs, that are the same whether you build 1 or 100,000, and you have variable costs, that go with the number of things you build. As an analogy, consider airplane ownership… you can do things to bring down the fixed costs, like move from a hangar to a tiedown, or bring down the variable costs, like saving fuel by flying lean-of-peak.

In volume-intensive industries, anything to bring down the per-unit cost is huge. That’s why J&J will spend millions of bucks of engineering time to get a lighter weight or cheaper material shampoo bottle. Car companies use robot welders instead of human labor, because the up-front cost of the machine can be spread over a large volume.

In boutique industries, where you make only a few items, you save money by not spending all that much time on engineering and just build the thing. After all, you can only spread out that cost on a few items, so maybe you don’t need to over-engineer it and instead just test & fix as problems come up.

Airplane manufacturing is in the middle, let’s say a volume of ~1 per day or (sometimes much) less. So, you have to balance the effort between reducing fixed costs and manufacturing costs.

I’ll soften my previous argument and agree with Brian, even without part 23 you’d probably still want a decent amount of testing. Hence, light sport, which pushes testing requirements onto manufacturers via ASTM approved processes, does reduce cost, but didn’t cut it by 75%. You still have to test the thing. I’d just say that you may be able to reduce per-unit testing. Take rule #8 from Kelly Johnson’s 14 rules – don’t duplicate testing. If your vendor says they have tested a component, empower them to do so and don’t test it again when it gets in the factor door. Probably requires a bit of liability reform.

Liability reform also helps to reduce fixed costs. But again, the General Aviation Revitalization Act didn’t make planes that much cheaper – it just meant that manufacturers could actually afford to build planes again.

In manufacturing, consider balancing engineering time with manufacturing decisions. I’d argue more analysis, not less, can be helpful (making informed decisions on cheaper materials vs. loss of performance, etc.), but there is a “sweet spot” that is a function of manufacturing volume. Design changes (due to mistakes, etc.) get exponentially more expensive to fix the further down the timeline you go – both in terms of retooling and the amount of time to market (incurring interest, penalties, etc.). How much have Boeing’s delays on the Dreamliner cost them? Cessna for the Skycatcher? That cost has to be absorbed in every airframe they sell. So sometimes more up-front engineering, which costs money and takes time, can save lots of money down the road.

Then, make it cheaper for the user to operate. If it’s way more efficient, the user may be willing to pay more up front. The users can get in on the game by increasing volume – get more pilots into it. Manufacturers can compete in other markets, consider dual-use designs. I know that some designs are already used by the military, hospitals, etc., but really try to tap that market with purposeful designs.

So you bring down costs with a balance of all of these. I’d love to start with some real date – how much Cessna, Piper, Lycoming, Van’s, etc. spend on engineering, test, liability, manufacturing (after all, Van’s does manufacture parts). Then we, as a community, can get together and everyone do their part. The FAA can make ATSM acceptable for all certified aircraft, not just light sport. AOPA and Congress push for better liability reform. Manufacturers take advantage of the latest systems engineering techniques (paid for in part by NASA) and do more up-front work before cutting metal and crashing test airframes. Homebuilders come up with innovative technologies and concepts. And pilots get more people involved.

No one said it would be easy!

Your original point that reliability drives costs I totally agree with above a certain level of the aviation food chain – when you start having to depend on the airplane systems as life critical the cost starts up exponentially. I was actually focusing entirely on the low and slow vfr end of ga, I guess because Bruce threw out 172′s and LSA

Thomas,
I don’t want to go too far into how innovative lsa/ultralights/homebuilts other then to say I’m skeptical (if by innovative you’re implying improved, not just different). I would point out vans rv which I think is the most popular homebuilt by far is very throughly conventional. And that’s not bad in my opinion. Convention came about from a lot of smart creative people attacking the same problem.

So far as the cost of regulations what I was trying to get at with my flight training analogy is you have to split the cost from mandated level of performance vice cost from pure bureaucracy. If you believe the mandated level of performance is too much, then for sure it adds cost. But I don’t believe that in fact I think responsible manufacturers would do 90%+ of the mandated testing anyway even if there were no regulations. And I don’t think the bureaucratic cost adds enough to change where aviation is. I do think the liability problem is doing massive damage to ga though, most especially from the indirect effect of essentially walling off aviation from the rest of the world.

If we’re talking about sport airplanes I think they could be made cheaper by accepting more weight and less certainty of reliability on everything except structure.

Serious traveling machines, you might have to just accept that going a couple hundred miles an hour in all or most all weather safely and reliably costs a lot with the knowledge and technology we have today. If you’re willing to give up some of those requirements (like safety) you can save money.

One of the things that struck me with Ted’s example was that he spent $75k for an engine, avionics, and prop. How much would the same stuff cost if it were for a Lexus? You’re arguing both will have about the same amount of reliability testing. Okay, I’ll buy that. But now Lexus will put them on 20,000 cars in one year (and in the case of engines and avionics, may be spread over an entire product line, not just one vehicle). That’s a big denominator for dividing your fixed cost. Labor and materials will remain fairly constant (sure, learning curves, economy of scale will have an effect) with sales volume, but up-front testing is a fixed cost that you can only reduce with more volume.

Hence, without more volume, we either have to accept less testing, or accept a high(er) cost.

The little digging I’ve done causes me to think Brian’s got the right idea. Aircraft are like bicycles: the more you pay, the less you get.

For example, you can buy an automotive derivative engine delivering 100hp, ready to install in a homebuilt aircraft, for about $3,500. Compare that to a Rotax 912, which would leave little if any change out of $20,000. What’s the difference? Quality issues aside (gearboxes are harder than they look, in particular), the Rotax weighs something like 50lbs less.

A lot of the things you could do to modularize aircraft don’t happen because they’re heavier.

At the end of the day, there’s almost certainly the potential to build aircraft that have much less impressive performance specs – relatively high fuel burn per payload/speed, in particular – but that are much cheaper to build.

Brian,

I’m skeptical about the non-cost of regulations, although it may be more to do with the cost of certificating modifications/upgrades than with the cost of original design. My skepticism is based on the very simple observation of the rate of innovation in LSA, ultralights and homebuilts versus the rate of innovation in Part 23 certificated aircraft. I don’t know how exactly regulation is killing innovation – it may not be cost directly – but it’s pretty clearly a culprit. Part of how you get costs down is through lots of little innovations; it may be that Part 23 is killing the little innovations, and over time that has added up to a big shortfall relative to the progress made in other industries.

I do agree that piggybacking on other industries is key. Aviation needs to start using parts whose quality/reliability derives from millions of hours of experience, rather than from design-for-aviation.

Bruce (Landsberg):

It sounds like you’ve found a topic that should be well-attended! I’d suggest posing a challenge – “how can we build aircraft at 1/3 the price” or somesuch – and see if you can select at least some of your panelists from the ones who give you more credible out-of-the-box ideas for doing it.

Of course if I build it the same I haven’t gained anything.

Where I gain is:
-Use a less expensive (lower performing) material. Fiberglass instead of carbon fiber. Steel instead of aluminimum instead of titanium. Etc
-Use less manufacturing operations. Delete some lightening holes. Use a single thicknesses material root to tip even though it’s oversize at the tip. Eliminate a complex machining operation.
-Reduce engineering manhours and cost by analyzing it with simpler, conservative methods, i.e. hand calcs instead of FEA

None of these ideas are new or radical, it’s already the industry works. All of them add weight. Weight is money & it’s a major reason why airplanes are so expensive.

I think you may be on to something with piggybacking off of the marine industry for innovations, as well as limiting the liability, but increasing the weight of LSA wont do anything for costs. If anything, it will increase it.

Just as an example, at the current weight limit of 1320lbs, the wing spar has to be built to withstand a force of close to 8000 lbs, in order to meet a 4G force with a 150% saftey margin. if you, as you suggested, increased the max gross to 2000 lbs, you make the wing spar have to withstand a 12000lb load. The increased engineering of the structure to withstand the load will far exceed any potential cost savings from weight shavings.

Limiting structural weight is not just an added expense, it’s good engineering.

Honda has anti-lock brakes on their crotch rockets that retail for something under $15k. On the other hand high end turbine ga, over 1 million do not have abs because it’s unaffordable. Think about that. The consequences of losing brakes on a motorcycle are just as grim, if not more so, than on a small airplane.

So far as rising cost, look at the chart pg 18 here:

http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/avs/offices/air/directorates_field/small_airplanes/media/CPS_Part_23.pdf

If ga cost just followed the standard inflation curve you could buy a new, certified, 4 seat airplane for ~$75k. A modern, certified version of a piper cub would cost ~30k. Can you imagine? I’d be first in line with my money, no kidding. Instead I’m flying a 40 year old airplane that I can just barely afford, despite making a very decent salary.

To me the major cause of lack of innovation is that there is no money to be made in piston GA. After all despite even heavier regulation there is respectable progress and innovation going on in the turbine world.

The regulations aren’t that onerous. Any company trying to produce a safe, modern, well designed product would very easily meet the vast majority of part 23 requirements, anyway. Yes the regulations add some cost, no doubt. But you are talking about fairly small percentages. Look at Ted’s example above. His homebuilt is no cheaper than a certified airplane would be.

It’s sort of like pilot training. If there was no faa pilot licensing requirements at all, how much cheaper would it be to learn to fly? Well on one hand you could just hope for the best with no training whatsover. Then, you might argue you’ve saved yourself 90-100% of the cost. That’s basically the equivalent design by faith approach taken by most experimentals/lsa/ultralight companies. To greater or lesser extent depending on how reputable the company is. On the other hand if you looked for an equivalent level of performance so you trained up to be a good, safe pilot how much less would that cost with no FAA oversight at all? 10%, maybe? Which is pretty much the same on the aircraft design side, in my opinion.

To me the only way for small piston GA to survive is to on the coattails of other industries where there is enough money to be made to drive heavy competition and the resultant innovation. Engines for example borrowed/adapted from marine or motorcycles etc. Except that the lawsuit climate means that no one in their right mind will take that deal. Lets say I go to Honda for a partnership to adapt their anti-lock brakes for aviation. Basically what I’m offering them is a chance for negligible profit in exchange for massive liability exposure. After all, after the first runway overrun under joint and several liability a court only has to find Honda 1% responsible for the accident and cha-ching.

The other problem, and I think maybe the LSA problem, is weight is money. To make something light takes more engineering work, more sophisticated manufacturing processes, better materials, or even more maintenance (everything from more frequent inspections to smaller access panels, etc). All of which cost money. If I could make a 2 seat light sport airplane at 2000 lbs gross wt instead of 1320, all other specs the same there is no question it would be cheaper. Sure it might take 120 hp instead of 80 hp and burn 6 gal/hr instead of 4. So what? At least people could actually afford it.

If AOPA wants to make aviation more affordable the two things imho are to somehow get the liability monkey off our back, and raise the weight of LSA (even if all other performance limits are the same).