General Aviation expected to increase

Although rising fuel costs helped send the aviation industry into a tailspin in the 1980s, the biggest push to disaster came from product-liability lawsuits. But general aviation is experiencing a rebirth, primarily because Congress in 1994 clamped limits on the product-liability lawsuits that had driven significant segments of the civilian aircraft industry into extinction. In 1986, there were 710,000 licensed pilots in the United States; today there are only 639,000, he said. Of those, 85,972 live in California, according to Phil Boyer, the pilots' association president.' Boyer announced a program, still under development by his association and a coalition of aviation associations and firms, to boost the number of new student pilots to 100,000 annually by the year 2000, compared to about 60,000 today.