Gas prices are going up, and it’s impossible to ignore. I just paid $3.36/gallon to pump some 87 octane regular into my car, and the current low price for avgas at my home airport is $4.16/gal. At Boeing Field you can’t purchase it for anything less than $4.72/gal.

Oil companies have returned their greatest profits in history. I’m not going to go into the politics or ethics behind their industry, but if this upward trend continues it will cripple aviation. Airlines are more flexible than general aviation, and will therefore stick it out much longer, but this is not something Joe Pilot is going to work with. Flying is not cheap—maintenance, insurance, hangar or tiedown fees—and rising fuel prices add yet another factor to consider.

User fees are something the AOPA has been fighting for some time, and thanks to the VLJ craze have threatened GA immensely. General aviation is a major portion of our nation’s economy – one of my coworkers at Apple, for example, used to own a large business and fly between locations daily. Flying his own plane made his transportation cheap, fast, reliable, and flexible. Crippling general aviation, whether through fuel prices or additional user fees (charging to land or use essential weather services) could lead to a far larger economic backlash than might be initially obvious.

Airways magazine recently had a really depressing article about fuel and the aviation industry. The outlook is very dire – peak oil is a problem that exists and is being, apparently, ignored completely aside from the small effort with ethanol. More than ever, work is needed on alternative solutions; ethanol is a start, but as it affects food production it’s not completely viable.

More fuel-efficient engines, like the aerodiesels used in the Diamond Aircraft DA-42 Twinstar, are one option, but the purchase prices of new aircraft are so high that it’s only one for the wealthy end of the general aviation community. A high-efficiency, low-cost engine that shares engine-mount fittings with the popular Lycoming and Continental engines currently used by thousands of Cessna, Beechcraft, and Piper aircraft would be an excellent upgrade that could save pilots a lot of money in the near future.

I’m working really long days at Apple, so the frequency of my writing is slowing down a bit. Next week is more laid back, so I should be able to get back into a more regular schedule.