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Re:FAA, do your damn job by Pasorrijer on Thursday April 07, 2022 @09:17AM (#30944021)
I think you're greatly underestimating the number of GA / Piston aircraft flying.

At my school, we have ~10 aircraft flying every day, 8-12 hours a day depending on the weather. Most of these flights happen over prime, in production farmland, or on the edges of the nearby town which has 8 schools at a minimum.

Now we're one of probably 5 aviation schools within a 50 mile radius, all of whom are operating at similar or greater profiles.

I'm sure the individual impact is small, but for every jumbo jet there's something like 3-5 piston aircraft in operation.

Re:FAA, do your damn job by bombcar on Thursday April 07, 2022 @10:19AM (#30944754)
There are 220,000 GA planes in the US. The number of jetliners isn't clear, but it's something like 45k flights in the US a day (some of those are doubled up).

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/

But the key number is there 25,506,000 GENERAL AVIATION FLIGHT HOURS PER YEAR, which is almost exactly the amount of 100LL used a year (technically some GA flights are jet).

Re:FAA, do your damn job by robonerd on Thursday April 07, 2022 @12:06PM (#30946401)
These GA statistics seem to include Aerial Work, so it includes a considerable number of turbine powered aircraft (most helicopters for instance.)

This Excel(!) document breaks GA hours down between types of aircraft: https://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation_data_statistics/g...

From that document, here are the estimated total hours flown by type of general aviation aircraft:

Fixed wing piston: 12.9 million

Fixed wing turbine (turboprop + turbojet): 5.6 million

Helicopter (turbine): 1.8 million

Helicopter (pison): 0.6 million

Aside, if you compare Chart4 and Chart5 in that document, you can see that although piston aircraft are far more numerous, on average they spend a lot more time on the ground than turbine powered aircraft.