"The real worry is what next? $600 an hour C182s are not viable."
It has to be put into context,
The old mans house was $20G in 1972, the same house sold recently for over &500G.
The hourly rate for maintenance over the last 20 years has been marginally above stagnant, yet, there are owners buying hangars "tin Sheds" half the size of ours for over half a million bucks, to which our landlord says, well if I can get x for hangerage, then this is your rent! Same to a degree for commercially run aerodromes.
The argument can be made that many other industries, such as my buddies boat shop, where the hourly rate is $110p/H have moved with the times etc.
There has to be a magic number for cost of maintenance, transparent etc, but ultimately, if we continue to barely be able to meet our overheads, then it won't be a decline of GA due to lack of interest, but rather, there won't be anyone left to do the maintenance. Look not only at the average age of LAME's, but the maintenance business owners ages, mostly in their 60's and 70's, who's coming through to replace them.
You can only fit so many workers and aircraft in a hangar and operate efficiently, so even when hours are recorded accurately, transparently, and billed, the margins are exceedingly tight.
That to me is one of the major problems with cost of GA. Yes all businesses have challenges with the cost of doing business, but when we continue to spend the same hours carrying out periodics/100hrly's, and the hourly rate stays the same, then my overheads will start to exceed our revenue. What then.
I could give many examples of industries with hourly rates well above ours, including the fishing boat example, but it is out of context unless you look at the overheads amongst other things.
And so back to Mike Busch and components, we are well aware of applying common sense, human factors and intrusion, right amount of maintenance at right time and so on, but at last check we operate under CASA's Rules and regs, I can't refer my surveyer to Mikes Law!