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Illustration by Sam Ward
Aviation is a niche passion. In the United States, barely one person in 500 has a pilot’s certificate — and the U.S. has most of the world's pilots. Of the U.S. total, a little under one half are working for airlines or in the military, which leaves a relative handful of people for “general aviation,” or GA. The non-airline, non-military GA activities at the 5,000 small airports dotted across the U.S. include piloting corporate jets, flying crop dusters, conducting search-and-rescue missions, doing air-drops on forest fires, ferrying patients to hospitals on “Angel Flights” or delivering organs for transplant operations, and in other ways flying for convenience, business or pleasure.
A Cirrus G2+ Vision Jet taking off. Credit: Cirrus Aircraft
Small and specialized as this GA subculture may be, it has long had outsized geographic, commercial and technological significance. Today’s U.S. hub-and-spoke airline system offers dozens of flights per day between, say,
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