So I decided to learn something new. There is a statistical software package called R in which you can write scripts that produce graphs of output. I needed a data set to play with and thought that the Australian Aircraft register is as good as anything, since it is available
here.
Some of you may be interested in some of the graphs that came out.
First everyone knows that the Australian Aircraft Fleet is aging. Well here is the data to prove it. The plot below shows the Australian fleet by year of manufacture, the vertical blue line represents the mean, back in 1984. What is interesting is that the decade from 2000 on had the second highest number after the 1970’s.
I was also curious what types were on the register. The data here is hard to work with as the official make and model can be pretty obscure and I am not sure that it is always accurate. Instead I used the ICAO designation which is reasonably consistent. The graph below shows the types on the register across the whole fleet. The 172 and 182 are dominant, but also interesting is how many Gliders(GLID) and balloons(BAL) there are.
I wondered what the recent types being made were and so produced the same chart but limited only to aircraft with a year on manufacturer of 2000 or newer. Here you can see several things. The R22 and R44 now stand out, approximately 800 aircraft. There are also a lot of 737-800’s out there at however many million $ a pop. What is also apparent here is the boom in experimental aircraft. The RV7, RV6 JAB4,RV10,RV9 and RV8 collectively all make up a significant number. Also interesting is the number of Cessna 172 and 182 still being sold. While probably well below the record highs approx 280 units over 16 years is better than 1 every 3 weeks, not too bad when their list price has to be close to half a mil ausie.
I wondered where the aircraft were built. It is no surprise that most of the aircraft come from the USA. What surprised me was how many came from the UK.
If I repeat the data plot but look only at the time period since (and including) 2000, then the UK drops a long way down the list.
But the graph shows that there were 1200 aircraft built in Australia in that period. I suspected that this was the RV’s and other experimental and so excluded all amateur built and sure enough the Australian manufactured component dropped significantly to only about 320 aircraft. Interestingly, someone has been busy with a sewing machine as over 200 of those are balloons!!!!
The graphs below show engines in use by type for both all aircraft in Australia and those built since 2000. Lycoming have a lot of sales.
Now the data is based on the CASA register and garbage in == garbage out. I was curious to see what location the aircraft were registered to. The graphs below show the state of the registered owner and the registered operator. These show that there are a few errors such as states being QLD or Qld or qld or Queensland as well as states being quite obviously cities or towns. It does make you wonder how accurate all the other information is....
Not sure that I have a point but just thought that a few people might be interested and so worth sharing.