[timbre]

Why are GA aircraft so expensive? A C172 seems much simpler mechanically than a car. I can see that the price would be driven up by low volume and probably a much stricter QA/inspection process... Is that it, or am I missing something?

[pdelbarba]

You're pretty close. Basically they used to be about the price of a nice car, but it become fashionable to sue the pants off everyone who was involved with the manufacture of the airframe if it was involved in a crash, fatal or not. An entire sector of lawyers emerged, taking advantage of lax regulation surrounding liability in the sector. This began at the end of the 70s and the prices skyrocketed to the point where Cessna actually ceased production of the 172 airframe. Congress had to get involved and passed the GA Revitalization Act which, among other things, limited liability duration on airframes. This was enough to cause the 172 to return to production but I've heard that something like half of the total cost of a new 172 is for liability insurance. This become apparent when you start to look at newer designs that have similar price tags and seat counts like the SR-20/22 line. For $330k you get a skyhawk that can barely break 110ktas. For $400k you get a composite Cirrus with better performance than a 182 (the next level up in Cessna's line). It's also possible that the inclusion of the whole airframe parachute system in the Cirrus design was enough to get the insurance companies to give them a little more of a break.

The other big factor is the construction. Cars are largely stamped and then welded together. Aircraft are either stamped/milled aluminum that is then manually riveted together (production volumes are orders of magnitude lower than cars so no robots are used) or they are made of fiberglass/carbon fiber composite which is even more labor intensive to form. The issue with the comparison with cars is that they're way cheaper than they reasonably should be because of the sheer volume that they produce. In the time it takes cessna to build one plane, ford can pump out 1000 new cars.

[microcolonel]

Regulations and bureaucracy. Some of it is justifiable, but a lot of it is probably not responsible for saving any lives. You can legally sell, buy, and fly an aircraft that doesn't pass most of these certification procedures; but for some reason you can not make a business of operating it.

In my humble opinion, the FAA does a lot more than an air regulatory agency should[0].

Since plane crashes are rare enough, the government litigates against everyone who ever worked on your plane if somebody ever dies in connection with it, and unless you can prove it was user error (expensive in its own right), you will end up paying millions in settlements and process. These costs are added at every level of the supply chain.

The FAA process could seem to make aviation safer if aviation technology never had to change ever again; but because there is so much to be done in private aviation that won't ever be done because of the cost of certifying craft with new technology; there's a good chance that safety devices have been held up by the process as well.

[0]: https://fee.org/articles/how-the-faa-brought-down-uber-for-p...

[mikeash]

I think a lot of the regulation makes more sense once you understand that the FAA prioritizes different lives differently.

Roughly, they consider these groups, from lowest to highest priority in terms of keeping them safe:

1. Pilots. These are the lowest priority because they're the most in control and best understand the risks. If a pilot wants to turn himself into a red splat, that's his own concern.

2. Knowledgeable passengers. These are people who may not be pilots but understand aviation to some extent and have an idea of what they're getting into. They can't necessarily evaluate all the risks completely, but they can do a pretty good job of it. The FAA can't directly determine this, of course, but they use "for hire" as a proxy: if you're just taking people for fun or as a favor, it's assumed they have some idea of what they're getting into. If they're outright hiring you to fly them around, it's assumed they don't.

3. Passengers who are random members of the general public. Most of these people know little about airplanes and about the risks. They can't be counted on to evaluate things for themselves. People paying random pilots/companies to fly them around are assumed to be in this category. (And people buying tickets on a regularly-scheduled airline flight are assumed to be even more random than people hiring a charter, for example.)

4. The general public on the ground. These people aren't even involved in the process and have no choice in the amount of risk they're exposed to.

This is why the requirements get steeper as you move from recreational flying to commercial flying. If you want to fly solo over empty land, they don't care too much if you get yourself killed. If you're going to carry a hundred vacation travelers who just want to get to the beach, things are more strict.

[microcolonel]

Sure, but no aviation company actively dabbles in endangering the life of its customers or members of the public through negligence anyway. In the case of an incident, settling with the victims is going to be enormously costly with or without aviation-specific regulations. Regulations that insure the NTSB has resources to follow up on incidents make a lot of sense, so do ones on accounting (in manufacturing and maintenance); but it's hard to imagine what positive effect the FAA could have outside of that.

[mikeash]

Plenty of companies have dabbled in it through lax maintenance, insufficient training, or crew overwork. It may be hard to find ones doing it now, but much of that is because of the FAA's push for safety.

(And I don't know that it is actually hard to find ones doing it now. Certainly the airlines are almost ludicrously safe, but the context here is GA, where things can be much more lax.)

[microcolonel]

Safety is overrated. In CA it makes sense to strive for it, and boy, it's safe enough that people are worried about radiation! But in GA I feel like a bit more risk is incurred for productivity and efficiency reasons. Some stupid risks are taken, but I figure that's because the market tolerates it. Smaller planes also tend to generate less risk on the ground. Who am I to say that they should be safer; people are happy to drive cars of all things, no matter how crazy they must be to undertake that risk.

[pdelbarba]

Statistically speaking light aircraft are closer to motorcycles in terms of fatalities. On the bright side though, you're much less likely to me maimed in an aircraft accident :)

When people get upset about the FAA's safety stance in GA, it has less to do with the part 61/91 regulations (airman certification/operating procedures) and more to do with the equipment certification standards. A common example is the reliance on vacuum driven gyroscopic instruments when MEMS technology provides better performance with a much lower probability of failure. Up until recently the FAA made it almost impossible to retrofit old aircraft with generic glass panel systems even though these systems provide vastly greater safety margins when used correctly. I personally have experienced a vacuum system failure, but luckily not while in IFR conditions.

Beyond instruments, the bulk of the fleet of 30-50 years old and beginning to show it's age, but it's prohibitively expensive to certify new designs that incorporate more safety features like CAPS (parachute systems), composite energy absorbing seats/fuselages or digital engine management systems. We're also still entirely reliant on leaded fuel (100LL) due to cost hurdles in certifying engines that can run on JetA or anything else for that matter.

[dceddia]

The FAA certification has a lot to do with it. Little parts you'd think would be cheap (say, a lightbulb) end up costing a ton of money because they have to go through a rigorous testing and certification process.

Here are some LED landing lights for a C172 for the low low price of $227: http://www.knots2u.net/categories/cessna-single-engine-model...