GA headed for regulatory trouble

wrote:
The recent spate of private pilots violating restricted airspace over
Washington raises the thought that some lawmaker is going to decide
that general aviation is a threat to national security. It's only a
matter of time.

I've taken some comfort in the fact that this latest incident dropped
off the news almost as quickly as it arrived.

My feeling is that we underestimate the difficulty of regulating GA and
overestimate the public's desire to do so. Here we've just had a really
bad month with drunk kids stealing planes, the usual summer uptick in
crashes, etc. and a slow news cycle and still one senses no urgency on
anyone's part.

While people will get fired up about local issues like noise abatement,
there really is no constituency for DC-style restriction across the
land. Daley has charged the barricades on this a few times since 9/11
and been dismissed with prejudice every time. History shows that when a
small but very dedicated lobby goes up against a largely disinterested
public, the lobby usually wins, for better or worse.

Also, it's worth pointing out that GA happens to have a pretty
bipartisan constituency, and an unusually well-monied one. While many
of us fly old 150s etc etc, the class of people that are buying new
SR-22s, Lancairs, and Eclipses are part of the "monied interests" that
have back-channel connections in high places. Put together I feel
pretty confident that serious top-down restrictions will not happen in
the absence of a major incident, and even in the case of 9/11, nearly
all turned out to be temporary.

The real risk to us is at the local level, namely the disappearance of
airports and the gradual shrinking of the GA base of services, driving
up costs. The recent Kelo decision scares me a lot. I've heard legal
experts take both sides, but my gut instinct is that this will
encourage municipalities to stage a lot more eminent domain raids on
unpopular properties like small airports, whose local supporters are
too easily overrun by real estate developers and neighbors happy to be
rid of the noise.

My hope is that the Sport Pilot/LSA segment will stimulate a lot of new
demand which will increase the constituency for GA on all levels.
Numbers are the ultimate defense, as the gun lobby, which has far more
dedicated enemies, has repeatedly proven.

-cwk.