An Airplane in Every Garage?

ByABC News
July 18, 2005, 10:15 AM

July 19, 2005 -- -- Fifty years ago, when Dwight Eisenhower was president and the postwar American Dream was being defined in the shadow of the Cold War, small, single-engine aircraft were rolling off the production lines in various parts of the country with the heady promise that soon the prices would be so low and the availability to Mr. and Mrs. America so great that just about anyone could learn to fly and afford to buy a personal airplane.

Hundreds of abandoned Army Air Corps training bases dotted the nation, ready to serve as local community airports, and companies like Cessna and Piper were in their heyday of small aircraft production. Ads began to appear in national magazines in the early 1960s telling the population that anyone who could drive could learn to fly.

While that's not necessarily true (there are greater physiological and performance demands on pilots than on drivers), the period created an expectation that someday we'd have several cars, an airplane and perhaps even a small helicopter in the garage of every successful American family.

So what happened?

For one thing, the prices of airplanes went up, not down. Even when you adjust the prices for inflation, the cost of owning a single-engine aircraft has climbed. In 2005 dollars, the original four-seat Cessna 172 introduced in 1956 cost $58,500 (in 1956 dollars, it was $8,750). Thirty years later when Cessna stopped building them, the 172 model cost (again in 2005 dollars) $90,700.

Today, the new version of the same aircraft from a restarted production line costs just under $140,000. For most of us, that's well beyond financially possible, especially since you also have to factor in the increasingly complex process of becoming a private pilot, which can cost upward of $6,000 with a minimum of 40 hours of flight time.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment with the predictions of yesterday, however, was the fact that the "everyman" aviation system it envisioned was at least 75 years ahead of its time because the automated technology required to keep a sky full of citizen flyers from crashing into each other is still at least a quarter-century away. In other words, the vision of millions of us jumping into our airplanes and flying off with the ease and freedom of driving somewhere was never valid, and for those who plan and protect the nation's airspace, it's more of a nightmare than a dream.