Small aircraft for everyone? NOT!

Starting on page 86 of "Technology's Promise" by Halal, the author makes a number of fantastic claims. For instance, "Costs of owning small aircraft are falling dramatically, and new technology makes piloting a small plane almost as easy as driving a car". I owned a Cessna Cutlass from February, 1991, to May, 2004, and my experience was exactly the opposite. I bought the plane for $40,000 and sold it for $75,000. In 1991, the cost of renting a Cutlass "Wet" (gas included) was $65 an hour. In 2004 it was $140 an hour. In 1991 I could land at San Jose Airport and park for free. In 2004, it cost $40 to park for a day. I routinely flew into the San Francisco Bay area several times a week, and the procedures became progressively more complex due to increasing government regulation. GPS is assumed to make navigation easy, but a unit approved for instrument flight would have cost $10,000 for my plane, plus data base updates every 56 days.
It is true that the accident rate continues to go down. I believe this is because the training and experience level of the average pilot keeps going up. In other words, there are fewer casual weekend pilots.
The number of student pilot certificates peaked in 1979 and has dropped drastically since then. It is far more difficult and expensive to get a license now than it was in 1979, and it is getting steadily worse.
The primary force driving the decline of aviation is governmental. Rules and regulations seem to increase without bound. The second force is financial, driven in part by governmental. Even after adjusting for inflation, the cost of flying a small plane has tripled since I got my license in October, 1985. A third force which fits between governmental and financial is legal. It seems that manufacturers of anything that goes into an airplane are easy prey for multi-million dollar lawsuits. This cost has to be paid by somebody.
Halal's comments on the Robinson R22, Eclipse Aviation, and Moller International are delusional. Halal's predictions in this section are not just wrong, they are insanely wrong, so much so that for me, at least, the credibility of the rest of the book is compromised.