There’s an ongoing discussion in aviation circles about the slow death of general aviation in this country, one which points to some larger issues surrounding our society and the direction we’re going. By general aviation, I mean enthusiast aviation, the average Joe or Jane who loves flying and takes a small Cessna up on the weekend to feel the air beneath the wings and the magic of flight. If you don’t understand what that’s about, it’s okay, we’re not all the same, and maybe you have something else that gives you that feeling, but the forces that are killing aviation in this country are forces which are changing many aspects of our society.
General aviation used to be something that, if not an everyman activity, was at least wide-spread enough that it had a reasonably large constituency in this country. In the 1970s, the US light airplane industry was producing something on the order of 40,000 aircraft per year, mostly small four-seat piston airplanes. That was a high water mark which fell as lawyers in particular began holding manufacturers responsible for what were basically piloting errors (Such as running out of fuel due to lack of planning and crashing). Instead of blaming the person responsible, the pilot, society came to see “small airplanes” themselves as inherently dangerous. From the perspective of a non-pilot it perhaps made sense to blame the manufacturer for not building a device which was completely foolproof, but it ignored the entire concept of what and who a pilot is.
So what is a pilot? It is someone with good judgement. Period. As an old saying has it, the best pilot is the one who uses her superior judgement to avoid situations which would require her to demonstrate her superior pilot skills. It isn’t about hand-eye coordination. It’s certainly not about bravery (Although that’s required in some situations, usually on the ground, when someone’s pressuring you to do something flying related you know is wrong). It’s not about muscle mass and cojones. It’s about knowing the equipment, knowing the system, and knowing when, where and what you must do to fly safely.This is asking an awful lot of people. But that’s also why being a pilot is orders of magnitude more difficult, and thus rewarding, than, say, driving a car. It’s not foolproof. At all.
Coming back to the collapse of general aviation manufacturing after the 70s, there was a push from many manufacturers into higher-end “business” aircraft. The reasons were simple. Most such aircraft were operated by paid, professional pilots operating in a more structured regulatory environment than the average weekend warrior who just went up for an occasional spin. Thus liability was not a concern on the same level. In addition, business aircraft were orders of magnitude more expensive than the little four-seaters, and thus had far greater profit margins. However, they were considerably more expensive to design, certify and build, so the market had to be large enough to support the upfront investments required.
Enter Ronald Reagan, or rather “Reaganism” to the rescue. At the start of the eighties, the average corporate CEO pay was perhaps 80-100 times the pay of the lowest-paid company employee. By the end of the decade this gap had widened to 400 times. Today, a few decades later and with our political discourse framed by the wealthy themselves (Media concentration via corporate ownership hasn’t helped), the gap between the truly wealthy and average Americans is even larger. Which would be fine if there had been an increase in productivity at the very top to go along with that huge wealth reallocation. But instead of increased productivity, which economics textbooks say is why such wealth disparities occur, we have constant evidence of malfeasance, book-rigging, and misallocation of resources. This isn’t capitalism in any recognizable form, just an example of institutionalized and internalized greed by those who already started out with much more than the rest of us. Even today, it’s considered somehow impolitic to point out how incredibly much more of the pie the very rich are taking from our economy than they used to, which is mystifying to me. What’s politics about if not who gets what, when? Financial deregulation was supposed to unleash the creative and wealth-creating forces of capitalism (Anybody remember Reagan saying “We’ve hit the jackpot!” when S & Ls were “freed”. Didn’t turn out so well.), but instead just started a transfer, rather than creation, of wealth.
The whole “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem” ethos ignores the very real benefits of intelligent, legitimate regulation. As a pilot especially, it’s obvious. While every flyer likes to crack jokes at the expense of the FAA, (Sample: what are the scariest nine words in the English language? “I’m from the FAA and I’m here to help.”), that’s all they are: jokes. Anyone who aviates knows without the regulation of maintenance, manufacture and training the accident rate in general aviation would be incalculably higher. Even now, there are a small number of pilots who still display shockingly bad levels of judgement in some situations, but the vast majority take the message of safety and working within the system to heart and are able to enjoy what is one of the most satisfying activities known to man.
Seeing first-hand, and being impressed by, the real and valid work of those federal bureaucrats makes me extremely skeptical of claims made by others that non-regulation of everything, everywhere, will somehow make the world better. It won’t. Freedom from government may be nice in the abstract, but in reality, it just means you’re at the mercy of whatever other yahoo is out there who doesn’t have a clue and who doesn’t care what happens to anyone as a result of his (or her) bad judgement.
There’s a direct line from the deregulation-as-its-own-good philosophy to the messes we’ve recently had to deal with in the financial sector. The cronyish capitalism of Reaganism had very real and detrimental effects for the middle class, from which the ranks of general aviation used to be filled. So this isn’t an abstract rant or argument about what those so-and-sos are doing; the policies we’ve been following for the last few decades have directly impacted one of the best activities of which I know.
But it’s not just economics.
The other factor which is strangling aviation is that enthusiasm which used to be the lifeblood of aviation has disappeared. As a child I dreamt of being a fighter pilot. Even with a dad in the military, bad (Or, rather, just not good enough) eyesight put paid to that dream, but my point is that for an earlier generation, zooming around the sky blasting bad guys was pretty much the acme of achievement, even if imaginary.
An arguable exception being an astronaut.
However, that love of speed, of movement, of freedom, has been, especially since the internet became a mass media of its own, supplanted by a social landscape in which individual achievement is somehow denigrated and devalued in favor of something as insipid as a virtual “like”.
Which is another nail in the coffin of general aviation: it’s hard. Now, flying an airplane through the sky isn’t actually that hard. I’m a flight instructor, and could teach the average person how to maintain an airplane in level flight in half an hour, at most. But that just means I can teach someone to drive around at a certain speed and altitude and (assuming they’re not insane) not have them turn us upside down or worse. It doesn’t mean I can make them a pilot. Again, a pilot is someone with good judgement. What that means is a good pilot has done the reading of the regulations. He has read the book on the aircraft systems and understands how every separate element in a complicated device works and interacts with other systems. She understands weather (Or, at least can functionally see bad from good). Oh, and after all that, he or she can maneuver a mechanical device traveling at speed safely onto the ground. That’s just when everything’s working correctly. Most important of all, and what takes up the vast majority of training, is learning what to do when things are NOT working correctly. And here is where the current infatuation with virtual-this and virtual-that is harmful to the growth of aviation. There simply is no such thing as a reset button in an airplane. It doesn’t exist. Yet the infatuation with electronics and the virtual world has created a dangerous mindset in the minds of many. It has devalued internalized knowledge in favor of a “hive mind” mindset. What use is doing the hard work of studying and internalizing necessary knowledge when you can just google it? If you can just IM someone for the answer to something, why bother learning it in the first place? And if knowledge and ability are of no importance, why not spend your brainpower on gathering “likes” or some other social media equivalent instead, like some dopamine-addicted rat in a lab experiment?
This is problematic in several respects for society in general, but in aviation it is utterly fatal. You can look up accident reports at the National Transportation Safety Boards website and see, in evaluation after accident evaluation that the finest aviation safety minds are agreed that the primary cause of general aviation accidents in light aircraft was and is “pilot error.” The most common reason for an aircraft to cease controlled flight remains the nut behind the yoke. It is thus, at least in some measure, a psychological problem. Pilots, in addition to a vast knowledge base, must also be humble, because there’s always a new way to die. But how can someone be humble who has a thousand virtual “likes”? If that’s the measure of success as a human being, rather than any true, real-world accomplishment, a person who’s a success in the virtual world must just naturally be better than a sober, responsible person (like, say, a good pilot), since everyone knows studious, introverted people are losers, right? This is a terrible mindset, not just for aviation, but for a host of activities, ranging from national security to finance to engineering.
It does no good to speak of the terrible feeling you get when something goes wrong at ten thousand feet and you know there’s no one to rely on but yourself. For many today, such an event is beyond their imagination. They simply cannot conceive of such a thing, since they are always plugged in, always chatting with someone, always going through some social ritual to establish hierarchy. However physics (Or economics. Or engineering. Or defense.) doesn’t care in the least about who said what to who and what do you think and I think this. Physics means that when the prop in front stops spinning, you’d better know what to do, or you will suffer the consequences. A pilot is in command, by definition, and that means you cannot delegate the authority. There is no reset button. There are no do-overs. What you decide to do, what your actions are, determines what will happen in an emergency, whether you survive or die and more importantly, whether anyone else flying with you lives or dies.
The danger of always on social media this and virtual that is that it affects the behavior and actions of individuals. It’s that first, they don’t seem to have any desire to accomplish something on their own, and second, they don’t even understand what it means to do something on their own. Which begs the question: if flying (Or any other complex, demanding activity) is something you must learn to do by yourself in order to secure the necessary internalized judgement to pursue it competently, how can anyone raised on a glowing screen ever function in a task-necessary, possible-emergency environment? Even with six-sigma manufacturing and fault-tolerant coding, devices still malfunction. Other people makes mistakes at best, are malevolent at worst. What then, when it comes down to the person nominally in control?
This a danger in the small corner of society that is general aviation, but it points to a greater worry. If actual achievement means so little, we face a future where no-one, or very few, will actually achieve anything. If everything depends on who you know (Or how many “likes” you have), and not what you know or can do, it is a bad sign for our society. Empires fall, if not attacked by some stronger force, because of internal weakness. Corruption, favoritism, tribalism… these are the forces that over time destroy previously successful societies. In this supposed new age of technological marvels I see nothing but the infestation of byzantine, small networks supercharged by the speed of electrons. Is the US destined to become the Ottoman Empire, weakened by an ever-increasing wealth disparity on the one hand and internecine and poisonous social and political process on the other? Are we doomed to abandon the individualism, freedom and industry which created our power in the first place? General aviation is a small and, in the larger picture, admittedly unimportant part of our society. But in the small details one can see worrying signs of greater social and economic changes. The death of economic opportunity for the common man is one such thing. The collapse of individual initiative and ability at the alter of some virtual socialization is another. It is disturbing that we seem to have abandoned our virtues with such ease and lack of consideration on the alter of mythical “convenience” which anyone who has lived a real life knows is a lie.