Overused Phrase Of The Day: Game Changer

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In my lofty role as editorial director here at AVweb, I am also self-appointed Chief of Word Police. We all have our little foibles and sacred cows, no? I actually have only two. I sweep the copy for two things; one is a word, the other a phrase. The word is “upbeat,” the phrase is “game changer.” (My friends across the pond at the U.K.’s Flyer magazine legislate against photos with subjects flipping a thumbs up, the ultimate empty-headed clich.)

It’s not that I’m so blackhearted that I want the world to be pessimistically and chronically depressed, it’s just that both of these descriptors have become so clich as to become running jokes of themselves, regardless of context. Marketers toss them off to describe the most banal of products and developments.

How clich? Permit me an example: Google game changer and you’ll get 48 million hits; upbeat will return about half of that. For reference, Kim Kardashian gets 180 million, Pope Francis 112 million and Donald Trump 200 million. So game changer is overused to the point of near fatal eye glazing. Plus, what the hell does it mean anyway?

It obviously comes from sports and may date to the 1980s. The modern definition, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a newly introduced element or factor that changes an existing situation or activity in a significant way.” The key word here is “significant”; otherwise, any and all change would affect the game. And what is the game, anyway? I think we can assume for this context that it’s the GA market, its size, its health and its growth.

Game changer has a big brother and that would be “disruptive.” A disruptor is a shift so elemental that it sweeps all before it, displacing it with an entirely new thing. This has happened in aviation and I’ll get to that in a minute, but examples in other industries are more dramatic. Railroad diesel locomotives displaced steam; electronic calculators disrupted the wooden slide rule; digital imaging disrupted photographic film. I lived through one disruption myself and it happened almost in a blinding flash. The first summer I worked on a newspaper, it was printed using ancient Linotype machines and hot lead. I can still recall the oily smell of the composing room. The following summer, those machines were gone, displaced by cold type. Eventually, a lot of craft jobs went away during that disruption.

And now back to aviation and why I don’t like using game changer or disruptive in the predictive sense. It’s mostly vanity. I don’t want to predict some product is the second coming of flight itself only to have it stumble, resulting in someone rubbing my face in a nave prediction colored by someone’s marketing copy.

(That has happened to me, by the way. It’s painful, too.)

Second, I have learned that journalists know no more about how markets will respond to products than do the people selling those products and they may know a lot less. People who read publications like AVweb do so out of passion for the activity, as an escape of sorts, which is why aviation journalism tilts toward boosterism of the industry. Pilots get enough gloom from the daily press. To be fair, aviation journalism’s critical bent isn’t extinct, but the blade often lacks an edge.

But using the “substantial change” threshold and looking backward rather than forward, there have been quite a few legitimate game changers in aviation. In no particular order, GPS certainly qualifies. It disrupted loran and is about to do the same to the VOR. Hundreds of GPS products exist now that didn’t 20 years ago and you can fly approaches into airports you couldn’t even a decade ago.

Was Cirrus a game changer? I’d say yes, because its particular appeal yielded a modern airplane but, more important, aggregated a pilot community that might not have existed otherwise. How about electronic controls for engines, FADECs? No cigar on that one. The uptake hasn’t been sufficient to ignite significant change. Diesel engines? During the past decade of aircraft production, diesel has gained a 10 percent market foothold. Is that significant? Yes, but I’m going to equivocate on whether it’s a game changer.

Glass panels generally and the Garmin G1000 definitely qualify as game changers, if not quite disruptors. There are still more steam gauge airplanes than glass airplanes. That’s one prediction that did come true, although I didn’t make it. In 2004, I was skeptical not of the glass itself, but its ability to penetrate the market. I was wrong on that one.

Two developments that were supposed to be game changers but weren’t were very light jets and light sport aircraft. During the summer of 2000, as Eclipse was ramping up, you could hardly open an aviation magazine without seeing VLJ—very light jet—or “disruptive technology.” I remember being told that these airplanes as a class might yield 20,000 airframes a year. It was all an utter confection, of course. There are successful jets in this class—the Cessna Mustang, the Phenom 100 and even the resurrected Eclipse—but they’re hardly game changers.

Judging light sport is not so easy. If we imagined it would usher in a new era of cheap airframes, revitalizing the industry and bringing in new pilots, it has fallen short. On the other hand, the light sport rule has kept many pilots in the air who would have otherwise retired and it has delivered several thousand new airplanes for a quarter to half the price of anything certified. Isn’t that significant? I’ll go all Fox News on that one; you decide.

The big aviation disruptor was the jet engine. It completely displaced piston engines in large transport-category airplanes. More critically, it disrupted the fuel—avgas. Although it has been a slow-motion disruption, avgas production has been in continual decline since about 1954.

And now comes the newest contender to the throne of the changed game, the Icon A5. In its August 2015 issue, AOPA Pilot declared the Icon to be a game changer that “changes everything.” Ignoring the weight of saddling it with altering the laws of physics and in the context I’ve sketched here, it could certainly be a game changer if it achieves its stated goals of bringing people into aviation from outside the usual channels. In my view, that’s because the LSA universe is a small one, and if a single manufacturer sells even 100 airplanes a year—never mind 500—that meets the standard of significant change. If Icon built 500 in a year, which it says it plans to do, it would, for that year, become the largest piston light aircraft manufacturer in the world and would expand current piston production by 50 percent. That would be true if the context is certified piston aircraft or light sport aircraft.

And that, by any definition, changes the game.But first, it has to happen. So let’s prop the door open and see if it does.

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