Even with the aviation economy only crawling along, I’m constantly amazed by the technological changes. Cessna has hung a diesel engine on a production airplane, Rotax engines are mainstream, lean of peak operations—largely forgotten since the 1940s—have been rediscovered and are saving owners thousands on fuel and maintenance costs. And those aren’t even new.
Constant change has always been reality. Yet, over the last generation, the combination of computers, and more and more creative people using them, has probably caused the pace of change to increase.