Steve Jobs and GA

Drew Steketee | Drew's Views, General Aviation News | October 6, 2011

I was going to continue this series on GA’s fate in chronological order, but Steve Jobs died. He came to symbolize the new digital era in personal, especially mobile, devices. In his time, 20th Century aviation was superseded as the wonder of the age, especially concerning communication, learning, information sharing and mobility — all the reasons people fly.

I’ve been pondering these issues a long time. Contemplating my aviation future in the ‘60s, I focused on TWA’s circa-1967 study predicting that electronic communication “would not affect” aviation/air travel until 2000. Back then, they were talking about video conferencing, the personal computer and Internet were still far in the future.

I posited a career based on this reasonable assumption: By 2000, newer technology could overtake us save a major new round of innovation and development. After all, we had seen it before. At a young age I loved trains, living just half a mile from the old and dying Reading Railroad. Nostalgically, they held “Iron Horse Rambles” with old steam engines on Sunday runs for rail fans. Inspired at 11, I “hired on” with a nearby railroad museum steam operation. By 14, I left to fly.

The obsolescence of rail and a mistaken taste for nostalgia raised issues even then. What of aggressive aviation development if the Cold War ended? If steam power, then railroads themselves could fade, couldn’t every technology? So advised, I planned my career in the mass market, personal flying side of GA only as far as 2000, perhaps 2005.

On a mid-’70s government assignment in San Francisco, I saw the future. Like going to college in the late ‘60s, it was a place to glimpse the world to come: There were a lot of people a lot smarter than me. The computer age would soon bloom. Something was happening. I’d hang out Saturday mornings “down on The Peninsula” (now Silicon Valley) to listen to geeks reveal the future over pancakes. I knew enough only to know I knew nothing.

The early 21st Century would belong to them. Steam to diesel to airplanes to space program to digital! To deny it would be to deny the progression of life. As Jobs explained at Stanford in 2005: “The cycle of life is nature’s way of clearing the decks for what’s next.”

Back in Washington, D.C., I felt lucky for every year in aviation thereafter, despite tough times. I was blessed with GA’s resurgence after 1994 with the improved economy and liability reform. BE A PILOT gave me an extra five years after 2000. But innovation and development had resurged only in business turbines.

During those years, smart people did adapt low-cost, high-value digital technology into legacy airframe cockpits. Only intrepid souls attacked the tougher challenge of new airframes. A very few succeeded; most didn’t achieve “mass” production or were not intended to. I’m intrigued now by the likes of ICON and the “someday” maturation of the LSA market. I hope for talented engineering, marketing and PR people to capture this potential — and recapture the public’s attention.

Should we just give up, acknowledging that the world has changed? I have to say no. Steve Jobs’ prophetic 2005 Stanford speech confirms that, revealing his life drama as ours, too. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”

Despite much evidence to the contrary, I felt sure about being an almost-too-late part of “aviation’s century.” And now, Jobs’ brilliance and perseverance in his field engenders in me even more respect for the pioneers and industrialists who created modern GA.

We can now only hope for new brilliance, perseverance and insight in the GA world to create and sell future concepts attuned to new times and trends.

Drew Steketee was president of BE A PILOT, senior vp-communications for AOPA and executive director of the Partnership for Improved Air Travel. He also headed PR and media relations for Beech, GAMA and the Airport Operators Council International.

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