The market for small planes is basically entirely gone; the entire amount is so small that they can't really get through the cost of certification for the amount they sell.
It's not "gone" as if evaporated; it has been murdered by the certification requirements.
The odds of a random stranger dying from a light aircraft falling on them are trivial, several orders of magnitude less than the odds of their being hit by a car or being killed by inactivity; the pilot is free to refuse to take off, so risk appraisal really is on them; it's time to dump safety bureaucrats into your nearest woodchipper and CHANGE. THE. LAW. if you want ANY interesting activities or skills to survive.
FAA is incentivized to do nothing and sit on its hands. It's a mess. A good quarter of the country is medically barred from ever flying, even solo. The chances of this changing are 0 and it'll get worse.
Insert the "who could have done this" meme with the FAA shooting interest in flying and # of pilots.
The medical system is really messed up. I would love to eventually get my PPL, but I also highly suspect that I have undiagnosed ADHD, and I don't want to essentially sign away my right to ever get treatment. Fortunately Microsoft Flight Simulator and VATSIM scratch the itch to fly for now, but it still sucks that I'll probably never get to actually do it in real life.
Disclaimer: this is not legal advice, it's just to give you some ideas. AOPA and EAA have resources that can professional advise you.
Note that 'undiagnosed ADHD' holds as much weight as me saying you have bad energies. There are many conditions that masquerade as ADHD to a layperson, including some purely psychological ones (they are no less real, but are very different from a neurodivergent brain and require very different treatment).
If you are otherwise a high functioning adult (can function in society, operate vehicles safely, etc), get your third class medical, which should be no problem. You have to disclose diagnosed conditions. Do a discovery flight and ask for an opinion from the flight instructor. If he thinks you are fit, go start your training and enjoy.
If, one day, you do get diagnosed (with ADHD or some other disqualifying condition) AND require medication, then it's a problem. If you don't need medication (because most if not all ADHD medications are prohibited), don't try to renew your third class medical (because, if you get denied, it's a big problem) and get advice about BasicMed. It has far less requirements; my understanding is, unless there's something strictly prohibited, if a doctor signs you up you are good to go.
You won't be able to fly commercial or faster than 250knots but I suspect you don't care.
Failing all the above, there's light sports aircraft and gliders(no medical requirements, you just need judge yourself to be capable and unlikely to be incapacitated) – although I am not sure you can operate them while taking meds; some professional advice required here.
Disclaimer 2: Obviously the above assumes that whatever you have does not impair you. This is just to get around FAA's antiquated view on mental health while complying with the law. The most important thing is to be safe. If you really can't due to health issues, then don't, even if a doctor says you are fine.
Just about everyone who has ever undergone psychiatric care cannot ever get a medical. There is technically a process but it is extremely difficult and expensive.
Some conditions are uniformly disqualifying, for good reasons. But it results in a perverse situation where a regular person can choose to either get mental health care or fly, but not both.
Pilots don't suffer from depression, smoke pot, take many types of medication as a child, or have many other issues because if you did - the FAA might pull your medical and you can't fly after that. It can cost tens of thousands to try to get the FAA to let you fly again if a medical gets botched. And that is still an if...
I didn't see that as a black-label warning on the drug information sheet for fluoxetine, or even as being a minor side effect. My shrink didn't mention anything about auto-failing a PPL medical either, but I suspect that was because he was a Freudian.
Getting treated for cancer, for example, effectively bars you from flying. There are lots of medical things like this.
If these things are that bad, those same people shoudn't be driving either. And this is probably true. However, if you applied these same restrictions to driving, people would absolutely go nuts on you.
No, that is not true. I got treated for cancer two years ago (surgery and radiation), it was contained (not metastatic), I have twice since passed a Class 2 Medical. I talked to my Aeromedical Examiner, I talked with my treating doctors, they talked to each other, it worked out -- so far.
It's not the certification: flying is an expensive hobby, with a huge time commitment. People have moved on to other hobbies and fads.
We see the same with dinghy sailing. It used to be a big scene with hundreds of ordinary people showing up for regattas. It was killed by windsurfing (at least here in Europe) and just people moving on to other things ,not regulation of any sort.
> It's not the certification: flying is an expensive hobby, with a huge time commitment.
People have plenty of expensive and time consuming hobbies. All hobbies are at least time-consuming, that's what a hobby is.
All certifications add to the expenses. It's the reason why one can't buy a headset off amazon and have to pay 1k for a used headset. Sure, safety requires certifications but I guess we went overboard. It's also the reason why GA aircraft are expensive to this day, even those build 40 years ago. It's pretty expensive to keep maintaining old tech at low volumes. I'm rooting for Diamond and their car-derived engines (as well as the Experimental aircraft scene).
Note that boats are also notoriously expensive.
There's a very good parallel to your example: gliders. You want to fly cheap (just to fly, not to go places)? Go soaring. Problem is, it's even more location-dependent.
That's a circular argument. Recreational flying is an expensive hobby because of the certification barrier. Most of the price is in fuel inefficiencies and expensive maintenance of ancient engine designs. Airframe parts are expensive because they're obscure and certification requirements prevent modern equivalents from being used instead. And so forth.
I dunno. I'm pretty sure the lack of barriers to entry, inconvenient and costly certification, and safety nannying helped windsurfing get ahead there too. That and dinghy clubs inevitably devolve into race clubs that revolve inexorably around the race safety boat, and if you just want to noodle about or explore you're out of luck unless you are geographically lucky or you can afford a yacht. (which is great. But it's an uncommon privilege)
Right, but that's the problem: with no market, things can't get cheaper because there's no capital to innovate with. That's why General Aviation is in a death spiral (ironically, since "death spiral" is a GA term): fewer people buying planes, companies exit the market and remaining companies have to charge more per-plane to cover fixed costs, GA becomes more expensive, fewer people buy planes, etc.
Why is nobody willing to take a risk to revive this market? If the only thing preventing a revival is cheap planes, couldn't someone get some investor to pay for all the certifications of their modern, fancy, efficient, cost effective plane, and then sell a million of them?
That is essentially how any new industry works. EV's were too bad/impractical/expensive until Tesla decided to take the risk and put down the capital to make them mainstream. Why can't/doesn't someone do the same for GA?
...which incidentally has a very nasty problem brewing with Continental engines, grounding of all of the manufacturer's fleet running Continental engines that were made in the past few years.
It's actually an aviation crises in the making with 1000's of SR-22s.
Part of the problem is that this V8 engine is a 2x improvement. It's definitely an improvement, but a sub 10x improvement isn't enough to bring on a revolution. The article alludes to investors' lack of appetite for the risk, I suspect a larger improvement would convince them.
If he actually got this V8 certified and Cessna switched to then it might be dirt cheap to run but the 172 with it preinstalled might be $1M because they will sell so few and have so much engineering & certification cost to amortize.
That's how silly it all is, and why it will stay stuck in Experimental.
VLJ's are cute, yes. I'm slightly hopeful about small scale turboprops too. Yes, generally turbines don't scale down very well (well, applies to VLJ's to an extent as well), but if they only could make the capital costs of a turbine decent enough, the reliability, power/weight, and cheap and available Jet A-1 would still make such a thing attractive, I think.
There's a couple of companies working in this space:
There's a secondary issue that in a lot of places the sky is a lot more crowded and the airports are very crowded.
I wanted to be a pilot. I took lessons in the 1990s at a small field, relatively uncrowded, relatively low cost. I stopped due to weather/money.
When I tried again after I finished college where I lived things were more expensive and the airspace was so crowded you would run up costs waiting in line to take off, and the whole thing was much more stressful.
It has to be fun, in a busy enough environment it becomes stressful enough fewer people want to fly.
I learned to fly in Southern California literally under the bravo umbrella - wait time was never significantly bad (maybe $20 of “time”) and I has substantial radio/tower/airspace experience by the time I got my PPL.
Even the relatively modern SR20 uses a Lycoming engine: https://cirrusaircraft.com/aircraft/sr20/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoming_IO-390