In the interest of full disclosure, I guess I should also mention that I recently bought an airport. Of course, I make about as much out of that as I did the farm I used to own before I developed it but I’m putting my “money where my mouth is” to keep GA alive.

Let me manage a few expectations – even if the medicine is consumed immediately ( which it won’t be) by all who need to drink it, it will take a little while to have an effect but there is finally a sense of urgency.

Readers here may also want to set aside some time when the September AOPA Pilot hits the airwaves and your mailbox. The Landmark accident and Foundation Focus may resonate with you.

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts.

I was catching up on my reading the other day and opened the June issue of AOPA. Looking through the advertisements, I thought to myself “Just who is AOPA magazine for anyway?” It’s not for me, at least not any longer because I can’t afford anything you are advertising.

$50,000-$100,000 flight schools
$500,000 cirrus aircraft
$30,000 efis/gps systems
$10,000 watches
$40,000 factory engines
$10,000 engine monitors
mulitmillion dollar business jets

Just who are you advertising too? Certainly not to me and I’m a 22 year ATP rated former airline pilot. Just who is AOPA’s customer anyway?

And to top it off, I receive the AOPA daily email. Two of the articles I really wanted to read were blocked because I’m not a member of the legal services plan.

The truth is, for the vast majority of us, the only way forward is to build/buy an experimental for a fraction of the price. A new airplane with fancy avionics for $50,000-$100,000 seems to be the right move. Honestly, AOPA doesn’t speak my language anymore but EAA does.

Just my $.02 worth.

And as a business owner, it’s not the cost of *regulation* that pushes manufacturing off-shore, it’s the (hideously) low cost of ***labor*** primarily as well as the willingness of places like China to pollute their environment egregiously that attracts manufacturing.

But how do we break the downward spiral?

One way to deal with it is to make your airplane also your car, so you can combine vehicles for expense purposes. Not keeping it at the airport or paying hanger rent reduces cost. Using an engine that burns unleaded regular gasoline can lower cost. With a little attention placed on providing a reasonably low purchase price and maintenance cost engine that is still reliable, we could really turn things around. That is our intention at Samson, and by certifying outside the US, we feel it is feasible.

The bottom line for me is not buying into the idea that ‘it can’t be done’. That is not what makes this country different, or what has worked for us in the past. The idea is to find a way it can work, and make it happen. The alternate is that we pilots disappear and general aviation becomes extinct. That is not the future I envision or wish to have.

This is a refreshing set of observations and responses quite apart from the type I usually see from AOPA members and contributors. I suspected AOPA was a refuge for trickle-down economic dead enders, fat cats who forgot their wealth was acquired under a political, legal and economic system that allowed them to prosper, or, to describe them in other words, arrogant sociopaths who refuse to acknowledge what Adam Smith called, “the invisible hand” of the market.

Not only has the cost of aircraft outstripped inflation, but wages have remained stagnant relative to inflation for that same thirty-year period Bruce mentioned (actually even longer), so most Americans, save for a select few, now have less buying power than they used to.

Middle class and working class Americans are now saddled with a tax code that offers ridiculous loopholes for corporations and the wealthy (witness Ann Romney’s $77,000.00 deduction for dressage for her horse). The affluent have purchased the offices and the votes of far too many politicians, who introduce legislation crafted by lobbyists, also the puppets of the affluent. The result: tax codes and laws that indulge the affluent to a degree that makes the U.S. the laughing stock of the world. Plutocracy, ladies and gentlemen.

Building more affordable aircraft is a no-brainer goal, but the FAA, industry leaders, AOPA, and all Americans connected to aviation, have to recognize that a government and an economy that only works to benefit a select few is never going to witness a rebirth of private aviation, and will never see domestic aircraft manufacturing rise above the status of a boutique industry.

If we in the light aircraft pilot community cannot win some big battles soon, middle-class GA will die. That’s because when the boomers stop flying, it is all over. Look at the photos of any aviation gathering. It’s almost all grey hair.