Is GA dying or thriving, with Tom Charpentier

You wrote a fantastic article in Sport Aviation magazine recently, which caused this episode to happen, and it had the simple but bold title, "General Aviation Is Alive and Thriving." That is, uh, that might be news to some people who are listening, so I'm gonna quote from it just briefly.

You said, "We are certainly not without significant challenges, but you would be right in saying that we have declined from the peak of our activity in the 1970s.

But dying? Not in the past decade, according to the numbers." So tell me what those encouraging numbers are and where you think GA sits right now.

Yeah.

So every year, I take a look at the General Aviation Survey numbers, and, uh, the GA Survey is kind of the best guess that we have of activity, but it's, it's done in a fairly scientific way.

If you've ever got a big, um, a big package, you probably sweat it a little bit when you open up your mailbox, saw a giant letter from the FAA, but it's the GA Survey and, uh, it's randomly sent to, uh, to aircraft owners all over the country, and it asks, you know, how much do you use your aircraft, how do you use your aircraft, things like that.

Um, and it's really important actually, when you do get that packet, uh, do send it in.

I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it, it's a very valid process.

Uh, they use a third-party service where everything's anonymous and it's, uh, it's a really good way for us to get data.

So I was looking through, um, the, uh, the, the data one day as I was inputting it kind of into our master spreadsheet where we track safety data and other things like that.

And, you know, it dawned on me that since I kinda got my start in this industry back in, um, 2012, uh, or, you know, right around the 2012 timeframe, I took a look at kind of the trend line of where the hours have been headed and just about every indicator is up.

Um, you know, total GA hours are up.

Um, total, uh, even, you know, in, in that, that you can break that down into instructional, into personal flying, 'cause, you know, the time is self-reported by types of flying, things like that.

Um, certainly corporate's very healthy and things like that, but ch- pretty much every indicator is trending up from kind of the, the trough that we saw kinda coming out of the Great Recession and stuff like that.

So I thought it was just kind of important to do a reality check that, you know, hey, we can only work with what we got.

And, um, you know, if you wanna reminisce about the, uh, the, the good old days, um, y- you can, but, um, but we, you know, we gotta build on what we have right now and we are building on what we have right now, and that's, I think, an important thing to keep, uh, to, to keep in mind.

It's a great point that often gets overlooked.

Uh, I've also looked at new pilot certificates, student and private pilot certificates issued.

They're both up over 20% in the last decade, so we are adding new pilots in addition to the hours flown that are coming into the industry.

Uh, and that's, that's important.

I think you mention a great part in your article as well about it depends what you compare it to, right? And compared to, uh, maybe the 1970s, the numbers look down, and lots of people bring up the golden era.

Seems debatable what that golden era was, depending on your age maybe.

But are the 1970s at this point even a reasonable comparison or is that just a, a one-time bubble that's never coming back?