In article ,
Richard Riley wrote:


How many pilots are there?

About 600,000 in the US.

How are you going to sell 1 million airplanes a year at any price?



How many drivers were there when Henry started building cars? My
contention, stated clearly in previous posts, is that price attracts
volume. The AOPA's Young Eagles program is designed to attract young
people to the world of flying. Given the current costs of airplanes,
unless the program combines a trust fund with the intro flight, it isn't
going to do much good.

I do admit that learning to fly is challenging and takes dedication and
commitment, not to mention a significant outlay of money. And I agree
with others who speculated that we may not really want to share the
skies with people of the average driver caliber.

So what if it isn't a million? What if it's 50,000 new airplanes a year
from one cost-conscious manufacturer? I think that's a palatable number,
and one that could pay for the cost of tooling for efficiency. I've
watched the evolution of CNC machines over the years, and you can get
some pretty sophisticated stuff these days for pocket change.

The company that won the WW2-era design contest for the military vehicle
that became known as the jeep didn't even have an engineer on staff.
They farmed out the engineering work. I bet they changed their own light
bulbs, emptied their own wastebaskets, and took turns cleaning the
toilet at the end of the day, too.

The trouble with many companies today is that they're obnoxiously,
arrogantly, and foolishly top-heavy. I've got a friend working in a
Fortune 500 company that did pretty well until they got bought out by a
bureaucratic monster company. Now when sales get tight and money gets
short, they fire three line workers who are actually producing product,
and use the money to hire another six-figure analyst to try to figure
out what's going wrong. That's only one of a hundred stories I've
accumulated about the stupidity of American manufacturers.

What was that efficiency expert's name who went to Japan after the Big
War to teach Japanese companies how to make quality products at
reasonable prices? He went there because the Americans were too arrogant
to think they needed him.