Jim Stewart writes:

Many of us have had times in our lives where car
ownership was not practical. OTOH, most of us
would now not find a bicycle to be practical for
a day-to-day means of transportation.

"Practical" is absolutely relative to a person's
financial resources, time, geographical location
and other individual issues.

And practicality in a broad sense must be determined with respect to
financial resources of typical people in the majority. Most people
simply cannot afford to fly from place to place, and so GA is not
practical for their transportation at all. People who fly as pilots
find excuses to fly, but as a general rule, their flying is impossible
to justify in any practical way--they fly because they want to fly,
period, even though they fly at a tremendous loss. It's interesting
that some seem to feel they must deny this and defend their flying as
some sort of practical solution to a practical problem. GA is almost
never in that category.

In fact, the impracticality of GA is what has driven the development
of commercial aviation. Commercial aviation has spent decades
developing methods to fly reliably from place to place under all
weather conditions, with minimum cancellations and diversions, and at
an affordable cost. Commercial aviation has tried to make flying
something akin to taking a train or bus, and it has largely succeeded.
This is something that GA has never done and never will do.

I'm amused by the perpetual predictions of misinformed or
overenthusiastic futurists who seem to think that at some point in the
future everyone will be flying a personal flying machine instead of
driving a car. I don't see that ever happening, for a great many
reasons. Certainly there has been no movement whatsoever in that
direction. In fact, over time, GA has steadily become more and more
of a rich man's hobby, rather than a form of practical transportation.

And, if the truth be told, I think that GA that worked like automobile
transportation does today would be a total disaster for society. The
unforgiving nature of flying tends to ensure that this will never
happen.

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