Survey – Decline of Personal General Aviation

[Timbo70]

Hello everyone, I am a fellow GA pilot and a graduate student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University working on my capstone project (aka thesis). I am conducting a survey of US certificated pilots (sport/recreational and above) as part of my research into isolating the factors most responsible for the decline in personal/recreational general aviation flight activity during the last 15 years. I would greatly appreciate if you could take a few moments of your time to participate in the survey. The data you provide may assist in better understanding why PGA flight activity is in decline and lead to more focused efforts towards reversing the decline.

The survey is located at the following URL and will be open from 2 to 18 Feb 13.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/pgadecline2

Anyone interested in receiving a copy of the final paper or the research proposal can e-mail me at: timmonst@my.erau.edu

Thank you for your assistance,
Tim Timmons, COM AMEL, CFI

 

[Jim Logajan]

Survey results can be found at the following links:

Non-Pilots:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yha0efl2b95lkj6/Non Pilot SurveySummary_02192013.pdf?m

Pilots:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/w7r9iw75o433ab4/Pilot SurveySummary_02192013.pdf?m

Many thanks to those who participated in the survey and to those who made meaningful contributions to the topic through personal e-mail correspondence and discussion board post.

Timbo70,

Thanks for presenting your results. However, could you please let us know what values you get if you do one of the following for the question "How old is the aircraft that you fly most often for personal/recreational use?"

1) Discard all entries with values greater than 75 years. The average aircraft age is simply too large to be believed. It is inconsistent with statistics elsewhere. A small number of people entering very large numbers can easily skew the average.

2) Or supply the median value rather than the mean value. A few outliers are not going to change the median by much, and it is likely a more informative number than mean age.

 

[Jim Logajan]

Jim,

The question confused folks because it was not clearly worded. The response box would accept any number. Many folks entered the production year of the aircraft while others entered the calendar age. I will go back and clean up the results to determine the correct mean age.

thanks,
Tim

Thank you. Unless your thesis is already written and submitted, it would be wise to review all the raw data and make adjustments (which you'll need to note of course) prior to submission.