I don't think that you could find 25 million
adults in the U.S. who are mentally and
physically capable of piloting a Cessna.
Ever taken a good look at the people at
the DMV office?

You would never get a takeoff clearance.

All citizens would have to wear hard hats
to avoid the debris falling from the sky.

Collision avoidance would be impossible,
even with computers, because the of the
computational complexity of the problem.

Millions of pilots and their passengers would
die.

There would have to be an army of air traffic
controllers. Sure, I'd trust my life to see the automated
air traffic controller running on Microsoft Windows.

Norad would go crazy trying to track that many
objects.

Regarding enforcement actions, with 25 million
people, it would be like the wild west.
It seems that people are becoming less and
less law-abiding; people are running red lights
without even thinking about it these days.
There would have to be an army of these
"Administrative Law Judges" to hear all the cases.

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Dan Luke wrote:

...in the USA instead of 400,000 or so:

There would be GA airports *everywhere*. They would be like beehives on the
day before Thanksgiving.

You could rent a T hangar for less than the cost of a 1 br apartment.

The accident rate would be about the same but the fatal accident rate would
be lower due to modern, more crashworthy designs.

You'd give the engine in your airplane about as much thought as you do the
one in your car. The idea of sending oil samples off for analysis at each
change would seem absurd.

Your new "family" airplane would be air conditioned. It would have a headup
synthetic vision/HITS display, emergency autoland capability, real time data
link weather and a CD/DVD player.

You'd have a second, "fun" airplane.

40-year old airplanes would all be junkers or lovingly restored classics.

Vacuum pumps would be deep in landfills.

Air traffic control would automated for most functions.

Regulation enforcement officers would be flying around, watching and
listening, but federal enforcement actions would be more uniform and fair
due to more lawyers and politicians getting busted and raising hell.

Frogs could dance and the Cubs would win the World Series.
--
Dan
C172RG at BFM