An Airplane in Every Garage?

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.

Flying for Sport

But what if all you want is the fun of just flying around on a weekend? You don't need a 747 rating to pilot a tiny two-seater on a clear day, do you?

Not if that's all you're doing. But private pilot licenses confer the threshold right to take passengers up in fairly high-powered airplanes with a minimum of supervision, and for those who get instrument ratings, it means being able to fly even when you can't see outside the cockpit (by reference only to the instruments on the forward panel).

In other words, private pilots need to be trained like entry-level seasoned professionals in order to stay safe, even if all they want to do is fly a home-built ultralight with a lawnmower engine around a rural field with no more than one consenting passenger aboard.

While the formal private pilot licensing requirements and expense were daunting, tens of thousands of wannabe pilots who just wanted to fly for fun and a whole new class of amateur aircraft were emerging. These were small single-engine piston-powered air machines called ultralights operated by amateur flyers who needed only the motivation to strap one on and experience raw aviation somewhat like the early barnstormers did in the 1920s.

This class of air machine included powered parachutes and hang gliders, but did not include small single-engine airplanes as such, many of which were available as home-built kit planes. The growing ranks of men and women who were flying these tiny craft were safely having fun at minimal expense even if they weren't qualified to land an Airbus in a storm.

As the safety of such machines improved over the past 25 years, the Federal Aviation Administration was actively trying to find a balance point between keeping the public safe and encouraging flight for the pure love of flying -- in other words, flying as sport. Now, at last, the FAA has created a new entry-level pilot's license to reflect that goal: The Sport Pilot License.

For a fraction of the cost, the flying time, complexity and medical requirements necessary for a private pilot rating can be sidestepped and Americans young and old who just want to fly for fun in clear weather can become licensed.

In fact, there is now an emerging class of ready-to-fly, sport-class light airplane coming available at costs much closer to the original prices (in 2005 dollars) of those single-engine airplanes of the '50s.

That doesn't mean it's a "fill out the form and you're a pilot" approach. There are still training and testing requirements, but while an FAA medical exam is required for all other pilots (for instance), most sport pilot applicants can medically qualify if they simply have a current driver's license. (Take a look at one of the following Web sites for a beginning overview of the class, the license, and the exciting new possibilities: http://www.zenithair.com/news/sport-pilot.htmlhttp://www.sportsplanes.com/Default.aspx

In terms of the freedom to fly, we've always been unique as a nation in that anyone with the physical coordination and the money could become a pilot and fly in and out of thousands of local airports. Now, thanks to excellent cooperation between pilots' associations and the FAA and years of work, the new rules promise to reinvigorate that ability and reignite the excitement by going back to the basic, magical fun of being airborne with the controls in your own hands.