AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2016 - 18

WAYPOINTS

Back in time

BY THOMAS B. HAINES
Editor in Chief

The 'good old days' maybe weren't so good

Editor in Chief
TOM HAINES joined
AOPA as an
associate editor
in 1988.

18 | AOPA PILOT January 2016

THIRTY YEARS AGO THIS MONTH I began covering
general aviation. A private pilot certificate earned in
high school got me a foot in the door as an associate
editor for an aviation magazine I had never heard of.
Murray Smith still runs Professional Pilot magazine.
Thanks, Murray, for taking a chance on a kid only a couple of years out of college.
In my first bylined story, I wrote about how FAA
Administrator Donald Engen reported to Congress that
aviation safety would not be harmed by a 4.3-percent
budget cut forced on the agency by the newly implemented Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-cutting bill.
That bill was the first use of sequestration as a
means of controlling the federal budget; the term still
hangs over government spending, threatening various
spending priorities-including those at the FAA. I would
get to know Engen well a few years later when he would
serve as head of the AOPA Air Safety Foundation and I
would become an associate editor at AOPA.
While budget deficits were nothing new, even in
1986, the Beech Starship was. Its unique shape and composite construction held great promise. Pratt & Whitney,
Rockwell Collins, and Raytheon ads carried images of
the pusher twin turboprop with its canard out front and
no horizontal stabilizer in the back. Beechcraft owner
Raytheon declared it "the shape of things to come." The
company announced plans for two more similar programs: a design with a T-tail that could be powered by
piston, turboprop, or turbofan engines; and a pistonpowered single that would "share Starship technology."
Well, not so much.
Although cutting edge in some ways, the Starship
was a colossal market failure, with only 50 built.
Beechcraft bought back and destroyed as many of them
as it could. None of the other proposed models ever flew.
Meanwhile, Gulfstream soared with the announcement of the G-IV business jet, a model that went on to be
the foundation for a whole series of successful large jets.
In news that will sound familiar, sales of piston-powered airplanes struggled. Cessna would stop all piston
production later in the year, blaming the languishing
sales on high product liability costs. Piper owner Lear
Siegler Inc. agreed with that assessment and early in 1986
stopped production of all models except the best-selling
Malibu and the Cheyenne IIIA and 400LS turboprops.
The companies held out hope for pending legislation from U.S. Rep. Dan Glickman of Kansas: the General

Aviation Tort Reform Act of 1986. Glickman said rising
liability insurance rates had added $70,000 to the cost
of GA aircraft, leading to reduced sales. His bill included
a statute of repose, limiting liability for manufacturing
defects to the first 12 years of an airplane's life.
Alas, things moved slowly in Washington even in
those heady days. Tort reform wouldn't come until 1994
with the General Aviation Revitalization Act, which
included an 18-year statute of repose. The result was
Cessna getting back into the piston production business
and Piper emerging from bankruptcy.
While the new law was helpful, it was not enough
to dramatically spur new piston-aircraft sales, an issue
that continues today.
One place where there has been much progress is in
avionics. Traffic alert and collision avoidance systems
were in development in 1986. TCAS would become standard equipment on airliners, and today similar technology
is available to even light airplanes via ADS-B In and Out.
Elsewhere on the panel, electronic flight instrument
systems were all the rage for business jets. An article in
Professional Pilot explored how designers freed of the
constraints of electromechanical displays could substantially reduce the amount of interpretation left to
pilots. An illustration of a Rockwell Collins concept for
an "advanced ILS" showed a series of windows in the
sky through which the pilot would drive the airplane:
"So simple and intuitive that...it should be possible for a
nonpilot video game champ to fly an approach successfully." Garmin today offers such course guidance on the
G1000. Today's cockpit screens show a blend of traditional attitude and directional displays and swinging
needles overlaid on synthetic vision across wide horizons. The displays are enhanced by many trajectory
cues to help orient the pilot-all driven by GPS and
solid-state gyros, mostly just dreams in 1986.
The Bonanza I own today was a teenager in 1986.
Back then it had just a basic six-pack and no weather
gear. Today its panel exceeds the capability that even
Rockwell Collins, Sperry, Honeywell, Universal, and
Bendix envisioned then. It's fun to reminisce about the
Reagan years, but I think I will take flying in the twentyfirst century, thank you very much.
AOPA
EMAIL thomas.haines@aopa.org

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2016