According to the .gov, there are about 313 million people in the US. http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html <---refresh this a few times and watch the number rise, lots of screaming babies!

According to the .gov, there are roughly 600 thousand active pilots. http://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation_data_statistics/civil_airmen_statistics/2010/ <---download table 1 for the relevant data

That means less than 1 in 500 US citizens are pilots, or around 0.2% of the population. When I first divided it out, I though I had missed a decimal point or something.

[hypothetical]
If I were a politician, and I really wanted user fees for example, I wouldn't lose too much sleep over .2% of the voters getting upset about it, at least half of whom probably already don't support me. Oh, I know it's actually slightly more than 0.2% if you count all the aviation related jobs and such, but still... Besides, if you consider all the airline folks that think this is a great idea, then it might actually be less than 0.2%!
[/hypothetical]

So, what group/who is the most effective advocate for us, the little guys (and gals too, although there're only 42 thousand of you, or 0.013%)? EAA...RAF...AOPA...? Where does your money go?




(Edited to tone down the rhetoric of the hypothetical politician in me--don't mean for this to end up in hot air)

NoCOpilot wrote:
So, what group/who is the most effective advocate for us, t

As has been mentioned in several previous threads, the answer is we have to start making friends for aviation as hard and as fast as we can. So maybe instead of a tiny slice of the population, there is a medium sized slice of the population that sees aviation as a positive.

The Young Eagles kids that grow up to voting age... their parents who saw the smile on the kid's faces when they got to fly... the local mayors and city council members who were made out to be a hero on camera helping load disaster supplies into a group of private planes. The farmers who got a free aerial photo of their farm or their business across the street from the airport. The news reporter who does an article about a kid who went flying in an airplane and decided to stay in school or get out of the wrong crowd. The guy who owns a remote ranch and remembers some local pilots are always offering to help him find a lost calf or horse.

Those are the people who might have a reason to stand up and support general aviation, in addition to the tiny little fraction of pilots and airplane owners.

The minute the $100 fee for a jet flight got mentioned, Craig Fuller and the guys at AOPA wrote to me and asked for $100.
Somehow, I think I am not going to like how this turns out.

I believe it is one pilot license for every 67 folks up here in AK, and that is not counting the pilots that fly without a license. Their daddy had a plane and taught them to fly, I know more than one. His joke is "why get a license? they would just take it away."

delete. I moved my comment to the "$100-per-flight fee" topic.

I have held for a long time that somehow or another "We must all hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately." The current unified stance between pilots, the military, and outdoorsmen and women over GPS bandwidth encroachment is a sight to behold. Pilots should be attending meetings of all kinds of marginalized enthusiasts to help us formulate plans for our mutual defense. Off road motorheads whether two wheel or four wheel, gunsports folk, users of public waterways like yachtspeople, water skiers, and people who fish either recreationally or for a living, ranchers who use public lands for grazing, etc. We all have a vested interest in protecting each other's freedoms.

There is a certain "anti" mindset at work in the world. I don't claim to understand it's motives, but I do understand it's methods. We all should.

A quote from a wall I saw somewhere in Philadelphia.

"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free."


Tom