FREEDOM, GEOGRAPHY AND DEMOGRAPHICS

Part of the great allure of personal aviating is the very real thrill of winging over vast, uninhabited stretches of land and sometimes landing smack dab in the middle of all that glory.

While progress in aviation technology was driven by the necessities of competing in a modern global arena, and it was, then putting that technology into action and into use was made possible by big changes in demographics around the world. This was very notable in the United States, which during the war years became the world leader in all things aerospace. It has maintained that position ever since, albeit with some impressive competition from around the globe---European megalith Airbus is arguably the predominant aerospace manufacturer in the world.

But the United States' embrace of general aviation has been far greater than anywhere else in the world, thanks to a confluence of factors. First, there was the sheer number of citizens returning from war in the 1940s, the fact that they were returning to a country that had not been directly devastated by the conflict, and that they were captivated by the aviation technology they had witnessed at war, often firsthand. The subsequent rise of the American middle class was a direct outcome of the war experience, and soon, American factories began churning out high-quality, relatively low-cost, entry-level aircraft manufactured using the same materials and design concepts as some of the warplanes American factories were no longer turning out at high rates.

One of the big crossovers from the space program was the development of highly sophisticated sensor and displays, as well as navigation and performance-monitoring capabilities.

These factors combined with two others to help create the remarkable story that is American private aviation. These uniquely American factors are the wide-open and largely privately owned continent that was still being settled by the end of the war, a culture of individualism and an almost religious belief in progress. All these came together to make aviation the perfect complement to the American Experience. This was true for practical reasons---airplanes offer an unprecedented degree of personal mobility even to an average person---and philosophically, as its core tenets of freedom of movement and personal autonomy were as American as one could imagine.

The result was that from the 30-plus-year span from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, American aircraft manufacturers turned out hundreds of thousands of low-cost personal aircraft for millions of American pilots and aircraft owners.

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J BeckettWriter