Another Two Bobs Worth
I’ve been around in this game in various guises for many a long year. I have a theory that Australia is generally 10 - 15 years behind the rest of the world in GA development. We are a large geography with a minimal population and the resources to fund the equipment we should be using are just not there, yet the distance still has to be covered, and until someone comes up with a better solution, air travel is the only way.
If you cast your mind back to the ‘70s and look at what aircraft we were using to do Charter/RPT/Freight. Compare what the Yanks were using. Move into the ‘80s and again compare us to the Yanks. Look into the ‘90s and again compare. We are generally taking over the Yanks hand me downs. MU2s, Metros, SAABs/EMB120s, CRJs, we always follow what is happening overseas, but always 10 – 15years down the track.
The financial institutions of Australia will rape you blind with their credit card/home loans. The profits they are making on these loans and the various charges applied to every day banking, are at the least indecent yet to have them fund an aviation venture is like trying to find a politician telling the truth. It just aint going to happen.
We have a government (don’t care which side of the political fence) that will slug taxes on airline tickets, take tax from aviation fuel sales, GST on anything aviation and not put the equivalent or a portion thereof back into the industry from whence it came, yet still expect to have the peoples of remote Australia serviced to full fill their promises. GA in a commercial form is and will move into turbine/fan in the coming 5 years. The Islanders/402s/B58s/PA31s/310s etc of today are and will be a distant memory and we will then be arguing about the best/youngest/oldest/modified turbine/fan. I’m seeing the transition now, with more and more turbines coming into the country, but what I’m facing now is the battle to convince people to spend that extra dollar and buy something that is low time NOW with all the bells and whistles, so that after 5/10 years, the aircraft will THEN be high time.
Financial institutions need to pull their collective fingers out and employ people that are experienced in aviation and have a first hand knowledge of what and how much it takes to run an operation. I’m not talking about a REX or an operation of that size, but the small GA commercial operator. Then and only then will we see a full coverage of Turbines/Fans and the quality/technology of the aircraft we should be using.
I have come to learn that there are two types of people that wish to buy an aircraft. There are those that need to, and those that want to. The guy that needs to will, in the greater percentage of cases, always look to buy just enough to get the job done, and is usually financed just enough to buy something to get the job done. The financial institutions don’t have the slightest idea what they are getting into, or what the pitfalls of buying a 15,000 hour King Air B200 with 2500 hours run off the engines and just enough cycles left on the rotating components to get the buyer to the next Hot Section. The guy that wants to will always buy whatever they want to, regardless of whether or not its what they should be buying, and generally the financial institutions are falling over themselves to get the guy to borrow money from them.
Will there be casualties along the way, yes there will. But we will pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, feel sorry for ourselves and then start all over again.
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"Second Place is First Place for Losers"