Student Drop-Out Rates...why?

"TaxSrv" wrote in message
...
No, it doesn't make much sense. The cost of enviornmental regulations
are
already in their costs and refining margins are high (including the
costs of
compliance). Most refiners are looking to add capacity over the next
few
years although with expansions not "new" refineries. The idea that
nobody is
motivated to make the first move because there are few players is
silly.
Capital investment decisions are made based on the projected return.

Mike
MU-2

There are considerable environmental regulation costs in building new
refineries, though.

True, but as with all costs there is a price point where you go ahead
anyway.

As to the effect of a few players, I'm only
parroting what industry analysts say about the situation. Soon it may
not be the case, but if current refining capacity can meet demand,
where's the return on investment now?

If current refining margins are high and refineries are running at 100% of
availible capacity and the market is projected to keep growing (all true)
then you need to begin the process of adding capacity today or your market
share will shrink as your competitors add capacity.


The following research by the Consumer Federation in 2003 appears to
adequately explain the odd situation in this industry:
www.consumerfed.org/pdfs/gasoline1003.pdf


The problem with this analysis is that it assumes that recent historic or
low pricing is the "right" price instead of being an aboration. There are
risks in expanding refining capacity. Record steel prices are one (you
might end up with the most expensive refinery). The record price of crude
is another (at some point gasoline sales could shrink as people buy less
becasue of the high price). Time is a risk (you have to decide now, but
don't know what the market will be like when your new capacity comes online.

Free markets are not prefect, they are just better than any other way of
allocating resouces yet devised. They do have a tendency of moving too far
one way and then too far the other. Oil company execs are driven by fear
and greed like everyone else. They want to have capacity when there is a
shortage of capacity but they are also afraid of adding capacity right
before demand collapses.

We, as a country, were pretty stupid not to see the crude spike coming (I
saw it and made plenty). One of the first things GWB did when he took
office was to not implement a planned increase in the corporate average fuel
economy standard. Most of the US vehicle fleet has been purchased since
then and all those vehicles could be getting about 10% better mileage, which
in turn, would reduce demand for gasoline which would lower the price. Of
course, The Market is currently changing the allocation of resouces through
pricing but it is going to be a lot more painful.

Mike
MU-2

It wasn't for the pilot of the Swift.

Yeah, it was. He just didn't. That stall at 50 ft was right over a
rice field. If he had kept his nose down a little longer, he would
have walked away. If you squander those two brake applications,
well...

Michael

On 2005-08-29, Michael wrote:
It wasn't for the pilot of the Swift.

Yeah, it was. He just didn't. That stall at 50 ft was right over a
rice field. If he had kept his nose down a little longer, he would
have walked away. If you squander those two brake applications,
well...

....well, the brakes still work to max effort - you just have to push
harder. Since I've owned one or two barely road legal wrecks, I have
first hand experience :-)

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

Skylune wrote:
Excellent grammar and punctuation, but some wrong facts. Idaho's PIT kicks
in a $1,129 at a rate of 1.6% and rachets up to 7.8% at $22,577.

You were correct that Texas and FLA have no income tax.

If I could bat that average in major league ball, I could afford the
gas to buzz your house every weekend in my 707.

-cwk.

Jay Honeck wrote:
In another thread, we have been hashing out whether some pilots in training
quit flying because of a hair-raising event, such as a brush with disaster,
or getting lost.

Few ex-students seem to admit that this was a reason for quitting, but the
drop-out rate seems to be far higher than it should be, and we all need to
do our level best to get more people into flight training. The World War II
and Korean War era pilots are dropping like flies, and formerly bustling
airports, especially in the vast reaches of the MidWest and Western states,
are turning into ghost fields.

We need more pilots, pronto, or we won't have anywhere to land in 20 years!
No municipality is going to pay to keep an airport open that is used by
fewer and fewer pilots every year -- and I can't blame them.

Off the top of my head I can think of three reasons (other than being scared
out of the cockpit) for the continuing drop-out conundrum:

1. CFI shuffling - You just get comfortable with an instructor, and off to
the regionals they go, leaving you to start all over with a new CFI...
2. Airport "snobbery" -- You walk into an FBO, prepared to spend thousands,
and you feel like an alien being on a strange world.
3. No Syllabus -- Too many CFIs work off the seat of their pants, without a
formal lesson plan. This drove me nuts, when I was getting my ticket.

You'll notice I've not mentioned the Number One reason people mention for
quitting: Money. We've beaten the relative cost of flying to death, and (for
the purposes of this thread) I will just leave it at this: Learning to fly
is about as expensive as a semester of college, and less expensive than
buying a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Let's leave "cost" out of this, for
now, as I think it's safe to say that there a millions of Americans who
could easily afford to learn to fly, if the urge were to strike.

That aside, can you name some other reasons for the abysmal drop-out rate of
student pilots?

Maybe they walked in with a polly-anna expectation of the blue skys,
and bailed
after seeing all the ownership/operating costs add up. GA schools are
close to the "career academies" advertised on TV.

JG