I have had several talks with men in the last two weeks about the cost of aviation today, verses the 1970’s. One man asked me if I knew the price of avgas and I did not. He said the local FBO charged $8.50 a gallon. Boy that sounds like a lot. When I learned to fly, car gas was about $.30 a gallon and AV-Gas was $.50 a gallon. Wages were about $1.20 to $2.00 an hour. I could buy 4 gallons of fuel for an hour’s work. The people that work for me earn a minimum $20 an hour. Looking at it this way, AV-GAS is more expensive as it use to be.
In 1970, I bought a 1946 Luscombe for $1650.00. A Full sized car like a Dodge Polara was about $3000.00
A new full-sized car is maybe $60,000, It’s twenty times more dollars. If we multiply the cost of the 1970 Luscombe by a factor of 20 it equals $33,000. I’m pretty sure you can buy a number of them for that money. If I earned $1.20 an hour in 1970 and I make $25.00 an hour now, it takes the same amount of work as it did in 1970.
Flying was simple. We may have had a nav-com. Then an ELT became required. It was an additional expense. Now we need a transponder, an intercom, headphones, a GPS and what about an engine monitor, EGT, Glass Panel. We found more things to buy and they all required money to maintain.
It’s like the guy that complains about being broke but he has a big truck, a 20 ft boat with a 300 hp motor, a nice car, a couple of dirt bikes, a jet ski and a snowmobile. We didn’t have those things in the 1970’s.
We didn’t pay for internet, cell phones or cable tv. We had money for other stuff. We didn’t have Amazon sending our wives packages every day.
My point is that I don’t think flying is that much more expensive. We just make it more complicated and expensive than it needs to be, and we have many more things sucking up money we could spend on flying.
