…think although you obviously have interest in aviation you don’t have the need or desire to fly or own an airplane is kind of sad. In the USA still feasible to buy a used 4 seat plane like a Cherokee for about $25,000 or less.
That works out at around £17,400. For £600 more I could have a serviceable Jet Provost. :eagerness:
Expense may be something of a misnomer. As John Green states earlier, he was happy to sacrifice 1/3 of his paycheque to flying. I’ve seen other self-deprecating pilots share a joke video of a pilot repeatedly turning up to an airfield in increasingly battered 2nd hand cars (he starts off in a Merc or similar) as he funnels money endlessly into his aircraft to the detriment of everything else. I don’t see it as the hobby of the super elite, but it does seem to be the past time (in general) of the older gentleman, as this forum will attest to.
I view flying for fun as, in part, a relic of a previous and more industrial era. Perhaps the decline in GA is broadly similar to the decline of the steel industry in the UK (stay with me here). We tend not to make stuff any more. Teenagers tend not to pull motorcycles to bits in their front rooms and sheds any more. Routes into that sort of employment seem to be a lot harder and, in some cases, vastly over-subscribed. At the same time people don’t appear to want to spend their leisure time messing around with machinery to the same degree. A culture shaped and built around heavy industry, and being mechanically savvy, just isn’t there any more, and neither is the interest to the same degree. Increasingly a portion of the whole ethos of our industrial past is simply critiqued as patriarchal, jingoistic and a bit imperialist, and accordingly shot to bits. You can see this in the way certain museums present certain artefacts, or the explosive discussion between Pat Hudson (Professor Emerita of History at Cardiff University) and Melvyn Bragg on In Our Time a few years back, whereby Hudson stated that ‘We must get away from the idea that [the Industrial Revolution] was caused by a wave of gadgets or by a peculiar inventive ability of British science or scientists’. Over the continued course of the discussion Hudson asserted the idea that the industrial revolution was all but synonymous with a quasi-racist sense of superiority on the part of the British. Ouch!
I don’t know if we are more risk-averse as a nation or just taking different sorts of risks. My colleagues with kids seem to subject them to a barrage of extra-curricular activities, including contact sports etc. None of them appear to send their kids to the Air Cadets, perhaps because (again) it is viewed as a bit patriarchal, jingoistic and a bit imperialist.
Perhaps all of this ties in with the theory in the TATA Steel thread about the EU demilitarising individual nations. Children are encouraged to study computer programming from an earlier age (something I missed out on), and car engines are now safely hidden behind covers only removable with screws of some proprietary design. There is no impetus there to change your own oil or fix smaller faults, and instead we are encouraged to consult somebody with a specialist qualification to get anything of that sort fixed. To get ahead in this country, one shouldn’t be too handy with tools, but one should be able to write a serviceable Java script. On top of that a lot of new technology cannot be fixed and is designed to break, further discouraging any form of mechanical curiosity for those involved. Perhaps being mechanically savvy is viewed by some as synonymous with building and storing weaponry, or perhaps just patriarchal, jingoistic and a bit imperialist (for the third time). I really cannot say. Perhaps the decline in GA is nothing more than an allegory for the changing views towards masculinity and personal liberty over societal function in our current society (I’m well off the deep end now).
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