Several points worth considering:
1. If it's the overall cost of operating general-aviation aircraft, then the price drop should be across the board. I haven't seen that; have others seen it, perhaps on Vref?
2. The surge in the Euro may be having the opposite effect. A friend of mine put a twin Commander up for sale at a price that I felt would be negotiated down substantially. Almost immediately he had a serious inquiry from Europe and is about to close the deal at full price. It's anecdotal rather than statistical, but worth mentioning.
3. Finally, there are things that can be done to effect huge reductions in cost. I just did my annual inspection. By following my recommendations in the "Purchasing Parts" page of
www.SkymasterUS.com I was able to do the inspection --
plus all the corrective work required -- for $1,470 (a cost so low that I had initially decided not to share it with other Skymaster owners, a decision I'm reversing in the hopes that this might help some owners keep their aircraft). For the two prior years the costs were somewhat higher ($2,090 and $1,960), or an average of $1,840 per year.
To be fair, these inspections sometimes uncover work that doesn't need to be done for the IA to sign off, but which we end up doing over the ensuing weeks. One might argue that some of this work would become requirements in the next annual, so let's add these costs: $1,450 in 2005, $170 in 2006, and $550 in 2007. If I add these costs to the above average, I get a new average of $2,560 per year. However, about $1,100 of these costs were for treatment in 2005 and 2007 of skin corrosion (sanding, zinc-chromate priming, painting) because the airplane is based in Miami, not in a hangar, and spends about 2 - 3 months in the Bahamas. If you subtract this, the average is $2,200.
Whether it's $2,560 or $2,200, I believe these costs are substantially less than for the average owner. To see how to achieve this, I'd rather you go to the cited web page, but here's a summary:
Find a mechanic who is honest, inexpensive and smart, then befriend and pamper him (I've known my mechanic for 10 years, he's the only person with free access to my house in the Bahamas, and I recently wrote his Will).
Help him during the annual, from removing inspection plates to disassembling items (during the annual I typically spend a week working full time with him, going home at night dead tired and filthy dirty).
Do all the parts procurements, based on the rules and logic tree in the cited web page (this is where the big savings are, and requires you to make lots of calls and Internet searches, but the savings, when compared to buying new from Cessna, can cut the cost of the annual in half).
So, keep your Skymaster by taking on some of the maintenance burden.
Ernie