I love your pieces Paul and you are correct in everything written here but you somehow lost sight of the elephant in the room…
In N years time (choose your own value for N but the outcome will be the same) gasoline cars will cease to exist. The gas station will cease to exist. Gasoline will no longer be a mass market fuel, but rather a speciality chemical with a price to match. The current debate about 100LL vs unleaded will be rendered completely academic. The entire fleet of current gas powered GA aircraft will become totally uneconomical. And for the few who can afford it, how ill it look to be the running the last gas burning machines in existence. Even heritage flying will look increasingly difficult.
Maybe there will be SVOs, electric air-taxis, hybrid commuter aircraft etc. Perhaps the hydrogen fuel cell will hold sway. But all this machinery will be new and expensive. GA as we know it now relies to a huge extent on the capital cost of the equipment having been depreciated years if not decades ago. The cost of all those Cubs, Luscombes, Bonanzas, Cessna 17-somethings, PA-28-xyz and all the others built between 1946 and the turn of the decade have long been written down. The cost of replacement with new metal or composites is simply beyond the majority of recreational flyers.
The elephant tells me that recreational flying is past its zenith and the only way now is down. As my doctor so kindly told me, after forty, it’s just managed decline. So too, it inevitably is for General Aviation.