I'm a member of a flying club, with a 1970 C-182. Seriously, this has to be the best value ever in aviation - 70 gallon tanks, burns 10-12 GPH, hauling 1,000 pounds, with full fuel, at just over 150 MPH, good STOL performance, you name it.
For all its good points, however, it *is* a 40 year old plane. I certainly enjoy flying it, but I won't pretend that it's a shiny new bird.
But there's another story to be told.... Airplanes are essentially hand-made. All of them are. From the obscure to the Cessna 172, they've *never* been able to be mass-produced like cars. Cessna almost made it, but not quite. And the price of planes is high, always has been high, and unless market forces change, always will be high. You basically can't buy a new certificated plane anywhere for anything near the cost of a high end car. You have to get into Italian super-exotic hand-made genre to approximate the cost of a basic model 172! And we won't even discuss anything with a turbine or jet engine which starts at about a cool million and climbs (rapidly!) from there.
The large, aging fleet actually makes the problem worse - pilots (like me) who hang onto their aging planes provide a disincentive for anybody to innovate and develop the mass-production economies of scale to drive down the cost of flying! It's an entire marketplace that's extremely well balanced to keep costs high and innovation stagnant.
The Cessna 172 airframe has suffered only mild changes from 1955 to 2010 - a period of FIFTY FIVE YEARS. There are hardly pilots alive who were flying when the first 172s rolled out of the factory! Compare that to the Ford Mustang... Comparing a 1969 to one built even 10 years later - they were totally different cars, totally re-engineered from scratch at least once in that time.
The aviation industry is a curious backwater in the modern marketplace, where innovation is slow, and prices are high. Part of this is the fact that aviation is simply more dangerous than driving - it's only with extreme care that we can approximate the safety of a cars which are otherwise driven haphazardly. It is, to me, frustrating, because I can see that while the population at large is growing, the pilot population continues to dwindle, causing the problems I outlined to slowly get worse....
