"Jack" wrote in message
...
C J Campbell wrote:


...because it takes a year to become a pilot, people are
unwilling to spend $300,000 for an airplane. The time investment is far
more
expensive than the monetary cost. Always has been.

People for whom that is a problem do us all a favor by staying away from
aviation.

Then again, that also may not be true. It would be interesting to know
whether pilots as a group contain a smaller percentage of bozos than
automobile drivers, for example. Back when I was riding regularly and
competing in the occasional triathlon I learned that bicyclists behave
little differently than they do when driving; you see the same idiots doing
the same idiotic things. I have no real good reason to believe that pilots
are any different. We still seem to have a significant number of us who fly
while under the influence of various substances, buzz their girlfriends'
houses, try to join the mile high club, etc. It may well be that the reason
we don't run into each other more often is because there are not very many
of us, not because we are trained to any particularly high level of skill or
judgment.

Another thought: an inordinate amount of flight training consists of the
equivalent of learning to parallel park a car -- and nothing has been done
about it. Airplanes continue to be difficult to land, maintain course and
altitude, and navigate. Why is that? It seems that little progress has been
made in more than fifty years. Even the so-called advanced technology
airplanes -- the Cirri, the Diamonds, the new Cessnas (and make no mistake,
just giving an airplane a plastic body does not in and of itself make it any
more advanced than a Cessna 140) -- have made most of their progress in the
area of navigation. They still are monstrously hard to control in flight and
even harder to land. One would think that flying could be made a lot easier
than it is now.