It's all relative....
There are many similar threads over on the aopa web site.. I just think it's normal inflation. Depending on which economic deflator you use (like the CPI, etc) if you compute $20K, what a comanche sold for in 1960, to todays dollars, you end up somewhere between $100K-$400K, pretty much right where a single engine plane sells today.
The 18 year limit law they passed doesn't seem to have helped much in regards to keeping costs down.
Could it be because it was never really the only issue?
As with everything in life I'm sure the answer lies somewhere in between what the manufacturers tell us about liability and what the lawyers tell us.
Here's something interesting I ran across. That would seem to bear out the "somewhere in the middle theory"
"The Federal Interagency Task Force on Product Liability, under the direction of the Department of Commerce, in its Final Report issued November 1,1977, found that the cost
of product liability insurance had risen dramatically, making it more difficult for some small firms to obtain adequate insurance coverage. The major causes of the dramatic rise in rates, the Task Force found, were
irrational premium setting procedures by insurance companies ,
the manufacture of products that are not as safe as current technologies would allow , and
uncertainties as to how personal injury litigation is conducted ."
So the causes were 1-the insurance companies did it, 2-the producers made "unsafe" products, and 3-the possibility of outrageous judgements.
So maybe right after the govt tackles tort reform, they can get to insurance reform, and product reform and heck since inflation is still under wrap maybe in 40 years those $100K LSA's will only cost a million
-Henri
