A high performance, affordable personal airplane: http://www.skycraftairplanes.com It's extremely fuel efficient, can fly 575 miles on a tank, cruises at 118 mph, and comes standard with really nice instrumentation including GPS, collision avoidance, synthetic flight, and an auxiliary input for your iPod. They sell for $55k. Here's the HN post I made a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5826062
That's awesome. I was thinking about buying a personal plane to fly back and forth from Canada to California. I came across this, though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDIXDRBJis It's called the Synergy plane, and I think it will supposedly the most fuel efficient personal plane. Thoughts?
Make no mistake though, if that plane makes it to the market it will be extremely expensive and will burn a whole lot of fuel. The engine they're using, the 200 HP Deltahawk, costs more than our entire plane at $70,000,[1] and while it is very fuel efficient for an engine with that power, it will still be burning 7-11 gph in flight.[2] It is unreasonable to think that this plane could make it to the market for under $200,000, and its hourly operational costs when you factor in engine overhaul will be around $50. Ours is less than $15.
The frustrating thing however is that since this plane is still in early development stages, it will be several years at least until it they are ever able to deliver an aircraft. The nature of the industry is that everything takes a tremendous amount of time. We were able to avoid this for the most part by using an airframe design that was created in the Czech Republic a few years ago, but before this our plane took 7 years to develop. Even given this huge head start, we've been working almost 2 years on SkyCraft and are still a few months from being able to deliver a plane. Flight testing, certification, and setting up production are all enormous tasks, and unlike a lot of technology startups, you can't release a minimum viable product in aviation since any product defect will mean death.
There are a lot of things keeping flying very expensive, but I laugh when I hear people in the industry talking about how General Aviation is dying. The fact that the GA industry even exists right now when it is so absurdly expensive is a testament to the fact that people will do pretty much whatever it takes to fly. We're one of the few companies right now actively pursuing the goal of making a safe, high quality airplane affordable for a middle-income person, and when this goal is achieved, General Aviation will explode.