It's fascinating that the record, if I can understand it correctly, was effectively unbeaten for 5 decades. I guess even with technology and comfort and reliability improvements, nobody else wanted to spend 2 months cooped up in an airplane?
In my opinion this is probably due to cost. Not just how much this would cost today but the personal cost as well.
Aviation is a pretty expensive hobby to get into nowadays. You're looking at $10,000 just to get your private license. This really limits the kind of people that can get into it. And the opportunity cost for those people to take 2-3 months off for a stunt like this is really high. Never mind the time that it would take to prepare for it.
On one hand, you have a lot of folks that get into it as a career, so after their initial investment (mostly folks get money from their parents, some take out loans) you spend a lot of time teaching so you can reach the 1,500 required flight hours to become an airline transport pilot. These kinds of pilots are more interested in starting to earn a living rather than take months off to perform a stunt like this.
On the other, there's a good number of older, wealthier, folks that are near or at retirement age. These kinds of pilots aren't the kinds of folks that would be able to sustain months of endurance flying and living.
Then let's look at the costs. Cessna 172s are still being made so we can compare prices. In 1960 a 172 cost $9,450[1], which is roughly $87,000 adjusted for inflation. A new 172 today will cost you over $430,000! A lot of this price increase has to do with the exorbitant cost of insurance for manufacturers beginning in the 1980s.
Just for fun I also looked at the gas costs, they weren't as high as I initially thought they would be. There's not many great sources besides anecdotes that I found, but aviation gas (avgas) was around .30c / gallon in 1965 [2]. A 172 in cruise will burn around 6 gallons per hour, so in 1965 two months of continuous use nets $2,500 ($23,000 adjusted for inflation). Today avgas is almost $5 / gallon, so that's over $40,000 just in gas costs.
It's worth pointing out that the 1500 hour ATP minimum is US-only, and only for commercial airlines. You can guy paid non-airline jobs other than teaching (ag pilots, bush pilots, etc.) once you have your commercial (250h min), and if you're in Europe or Asia you can get an airline job at well below 1500.
I don't know a lot about the industry, but being a non-airline commercial pilot sounds like an enjoyable job for an introvert. Like over-the-road trucking, but with a cooler machine.
It depends. Ag and bush stuff can be pretty dangerous. The CFI that I got my PPL from left when he was below ATP mins and was flying PC-12s and M500/M600s around for a place that sold them (no passenger stuff I am aware of). You can do 135 VFR work at 500 TT as well, but IFR reqs are 1200 so most jobs require 1200.
And yeah the pay is dog shit, barely any better than a CFI. I haven't checked the market in a while but if I recall, CFIs that are employees for mom and pop shops are lucky to pull in $20-25/hr when they're flying, and will be half that when they're not. Independent ones can make a lot more but then they typically need to have a plane on top of that which has its own issues.
It wasn't a particularly cheap stunt then, but it ended up being worth the publicity. I think a similar stunt now, in a world of highly reliable machines and always-on media, just wouldn't gather enough attention to make the cost worth it. Basically, I think they were on the tail end of people caring about this kind of thing.
>You're looking at $10,000 just to get your private license.
Modern tuition for college is much more expensive than this, and yet people continue to go to college. It doesn't seem to be limit the number of people as you suggest this is the limiting factor on the number of people getting license. A quick internet search shows that learning become a truck driver can also cost close to $10k as well.
Near the end of the article/podcast they say that the group that kept track of the records stopped allowing new entries. So officially no one can break the record.
