Gig 601XL Builder wr.giacona@coxDOTnet wrote:

Ok. sorry but the vast majority of flying Skyhawks are not the newer SPs but
the older "plain old Skyhawks."

Well, Gig, I have to thank you. Your statement above was screaming for a
reference to back it up but instead of putting the burden on you, I decided
to try to prove or disprove it myself.

Therefore, I visited the FAA website and discovered that the FAA registered
aircraft database is offered there as a free, downloadable zip file.

Without a database management tool on my PC, I then downloaded the Open
Source database product called MySQL. Fortunately for me, there was a
Windows install routine that made installation and configuration rather
painless.

I then created a couple of tables and imported the aircraft reference data
and the master registration data from the FAA zip file (data current as of
August 5th, 2005).

The end result? I was able to query the two tables to see exactly how many
C172s manufactured from 1997 onward are registered compared to the number
of C172s manufactured prior to 1996.

Note that it appears that 1986 was the year Cessna ceased production of
C172s until the GA Revitalization Act, but for some reason there are three
aircraft in the database with a 1988 MFG date and 1 with a 1994 date
(perhaps this was a test A/C?).

Of course, there is the legitimate argument that not all aircraft
registered are actively flown. Logic suggests that this would be more
applicable to older aircraft than newer, so the pre-1996 numbers could be
lowered by some degree. Here are the results:


Number of C172s registered, pre- and post-General Aviation Revitalization
Act (C172s produced from 1997 onward are all the modern, fuel-injected,
more advanced avionics models we have been discussing):

1997 onward - 2,305
1986 and prior - 24,251

So, about 91% of all registered C172s are pre-1996. I suppose that
qualifies as a vast majority.


--
Peter
























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