If there’s anything that the FAA’s latest aviation industry forecast proves, it’s that you can make the numbers paint just about any picture you want them to, especially when you’re guessing using assumptions about what might happen 20 years from now.
For instance, what if I told you that the number of student pilots in the U.S. at the end of 2010 increased by 64.8 percent, skyrocketing from around 72,000 in 2009 to more than 119,000 one year later. Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last decade, you’d immediately realize there’s a problem with the data. In this case, the huge spike occurred simply because the FAA two years ago decided to increase the validity of student pilot certificates from 36 months to 60 months.
The FAA also predicts the number of piston aircraft in the U.S. will decline from a total of 159,007 in 2010 to 151,685 by 2023 before rebounding slightly to 155,395 by 2032. That’s a big decline from previous forecasts, which had projected fleet increases across the board. Again, a change in the assumptions the FAA uses in its forecast is to blame. At a Transportation Research Board meeting attended by industry and academic experts, the FAA was told that what it was forecasting was simply too high. There are many thousands of single-engine piston aircraft that are getting older and dropping out of the fleet, and that trend is expected to continue for many years.
The agency does expect there to be replacements for aging piston airplanes, but it doesn’t say how many or how quickly. As new aircraft are built, the hours will start picking up again, the FAA concedes, hinting of a shift to more business flying and less leisure flying among the private pilot ranks in the future. Again, nowhere in the forecast does the agency attempt to back up that prediction with hard data.
The report also projects a doubling of airline passenger traffic to well over a billion passengers a year, with nary a hiccup in the predicted upswing at any time in the next two decades. Indeed, the agency says airlines appear to have solved their past woes by charging for checked bags and snacks – what the agency touts as new “revenue streams.” The forecast doesn’t address how all those extra passengers and airline flights will shoehorn in at busy major airports that are already suffering from a lack of gate space, but predictably it predicts that NextGen, somehow, will be the end-all cure.
It’s hard to take this forecast too seriously considering all the assumptions that have changed in recent years and all the possibilities that are seemingly ignored in this latest version. Even the folks who put together such crystal-ball assertions admit that they become less accurate the further out in time they attempt to see.
The good news is that there’s always an update to the current forecast just a year away. I wonder what kind of picture the numbers will be painting then?
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