A few months back a gentleman contacted me from the upper Midwest as he wanted to start an aircraft cleaning service, he told me that there was only one person cleaning aircraft on the local field, and he was only doing it on an on-call-basis, as he had a full-time job doing something else.
My acquaintance asked me if I thought it made sense to get some business data first and prepare a business plan - yes, that always makes sense whenever someone is starting up a new business of course, and he'd already scouted the area for potential competition it seems.
Okay so, let's talk shall we? He asked me if I thought he should use the FAA or Federal Aviation Administration's data for the number of aircraft on the field and the names and addresses of the owners of those aircraft.
Well, my thoughts on this might surprise you so let me explain what I told him.
Personally, I don't have much faith in the FAA data as much of it is false, misleading, and worthless, in fact, you can't use it for much of anything when it comes to aircraft washing, as their data is no good, and often lists owners as corporations in other states, so the county data would be better, but the best data is to go out and look for yourself.
"Imagine how much better it would be if the government would get out of the aviation sector completely?" I asked him to ponder, you see, the entire general aviation sector is riddled with over regulation stifling the industry.
When it comes to getting the right data, well, I can get better data from the private sector - we built that.
My grandfather was the youngest FAA chief of an international airport, spent his life in that bureaucracy, it's just gotten worse.
Between that and the TSA, DHS, DOT, they've destroyed general aviation and this administration of ours the class-warfare against private jet aircraft has killed the industry, now it is moving to China.
The government in this case is much worse than the competition when it comes to aircraft washing, not a friend, not a resource, it is the problem, they are killing general aviation, high-tech jobs, it is amazing.
To say that FAA has important data, that's just not correct, in fact the FAA has stated that 1/3 of their registrations for aircraft have outdated or wrong information.
Okay so, I hope I have adequately answered that question and look forward to my readers sending in their questions as well.
Please consider all this and think on it.