Comments

Maybe people would buy a "bare-bones" aircraft if it was the same cost as a family Sedan (say about $30,000; though I question whether you could manufacture and aircraft for that little in this day and age). The reason people are buying these LSAs with all the options is because the people who can afford a base price near $100,000 can afford all the options. Let's face it: most of these LSA's would still be in the $60,000+ range if they had simple gauges and interiors and fewer features. $60,000 (plus hangar, insurance, and fuel costs) is still more than most folks can afford, even aviation enthusiasts who are willing to own a smaller house, an older car, etc. In fact, I would argue that the entire used airplane market is proof of this fact - there are plenty of aircraft out there for $20k to $40k that still use mostly steam gauges and are bought and sold frequently. Indeed, the existence of that market of used aircraft may itself be an impediment to the low-cost-but-new-airplane segment. As has been discussed - how many makes and models do you need, in order to saturate the market? Its not just new aircraft; used aircraft count towards that saturation point, too!

The FAA organization that puts together paper charts is already storing all of this info in digital format, right? So the "cost" to the FAA for giving away digital data is simply the cost of running servers, paying for bandwidth, and paying someone's salary to organize and update the files as-needed. I'm an IT professional with decades of experience, and I can tell you that this isn't a hard thing to do. It takes a bit of work, but nothing overly expensive our outlandish. If even 100,000 pilots are using this data, the cost per user probably approaches the same cost as having the paper charts organized, printed, and distributed. So why charge so much more for the digital data? Smells like bureaucracy and a money-grab, to me. Someone somewhere probably doesn't want their precious infrastructure and old-school processes (for paper charting) to get modified or go away, so they're putting their foot down and requiring a whole new infrastructure to support digital chart data. And as others have pointed out, it gets even easier (and cheaper) for the FAA if they restrict distribution of their digital data to a handful of licensees (app developers), and the licensees bear the brunt of the infrastructure costs in downloading the data to individual users. That setup is nothing new for app developers and promotes efficiency and competition between service providers. They seem hell-bent on over-complicating something that should be cheap and "easy" (OK, if not outright easy then at least straightforward) in today's digital landscape.