You can buy a new one for less than $40,000 and there’s no pilot’s license required.
intercst
3 Likes
DH owned two Cessnas in the past (a Cessna 150 and a Cardinal). These were older models and not more expensive than a car.
Although I had a pilot’s license, DH did 99% of the flying. He flew the plane from Alaska to the Bahamas and from Nova Scotia to Seattle – numerous cross-country trips over the years. We ran into many weather-related potentially-fatal situations.
The “electric flying machines” described in the article are ultra-light aircraft with electric instead of internal combustion engines. There have always been ultralights which follow different regulations than airplanes. I assume that anyone who can afford to own an ultralight will read and follow the regulations.
As the article says, ultralights can be a practical form of transportation in some situations (such as the rural areas). But pilots say:
“Time to spare, go by air” because adverse weather could keep you on the ground for a long time.
And … “I’d rather be on the ground wishing I was flying than flying wishing I was on the ground.”
These ultralights are only “dangerously affordable” if you think that people who have less money to spend are more likely to act dangerously than people who have more money to spend.
Wendy
6 Likes
Yep. While you see lots of cases of folks with “more money than brains”, less money and fewer brains is going to be more dangerous.
I got my pilot’s license back in 2014 when I noticed that for whatever reason, Portland was the cheapest place in the country to rent an aircraft. Then I spent 5 or 6 years flying rented piston-powered aircraft around the Pacific Northwest. What I observed was that it’s interesting learning how to fly, but it gets routine after a while. If you’re doing it correctly, it’s not supposed to be exciting.
The other thing I found interesting is that most aircraft owners seem to ignore the cost of purchasing the aircraft when they calculate their hourly cost of flying. Just the cost of having an aircraft sit in the hanger and paying for insurance and annual inspections was equal to about 80 hours of rental time. And 80 hours is a lot of flying – few aircraft owners put more than 100 hours per year on the engine.
More so than real estate, you really want to be using a rent vs. buy calculation to inform your decision making.
intercst
(rent vs. buy, and long-term buy & hold)
4 Likes
DH did that calculation. He flew a LOT so the purchase decision made sense. There’s a difference between flying a rented plane for a few hours around the local area and flying your own plane for a week at a time across the continent.
Same for the decision to buy a house. I bought DH’s house from him in 1990 with the profit from the sale of my own house. (Enabling him to pay off his own mortgage on that primary residence.) We haven’t paid a mortgage or rent since 1990.
Wendy
3 Likes
I bet that that’s a trip you only want to do once, unless you’re flying something like a Pilatus. Small piston powered aircraft tend to be noisy and uncomfortable.
intercst
Nothing could equal the highway system in Connecticut. I would not worry about it.
My FIL has a friend that flew himself for a while. He had a 4-seater and would periodically fly down from Atlanta to south Florida. Sometimes he took my in-laws. More accurately he took my in-laws once, and then took my FIL multiple times after that. My MIL didn’t like the experience of a small plane. They had to stop and refuel once (or maybe even twice) along the way, so it was no time saver, and really ended up being kind of a hassle. Once he (the friend) was in his 70s, he stopped flying himself and sold his plane. Anyway, he said the same thing, for the first 5 years it was a LOT of fun, for the next 10 years, it was “cool”, and then after that it was a different kind of drudgery.
True, small planes such as a Cessna 150 are small and noisy. But we flew that plane (and later, a Cardinal) cross-country every year for several years at least once, stopping at the EAA Fly-in along the way. Also to Florida, the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic as well as Canada. Wearing headphones and ear plugs. DH flew from DE to Alaska after he lost his job, while I was working.
Eventually, we sold the Cessna 150. The Cardinal was somewhat crunched after DH made a forced landing on a 4-lane highway in Florida. (Long story.) After that, all vehicles had 4 wheels firmly planted on the ground. Flying was never my passion the way it was DH’s.
If you want to fly you have to work. If you work, no time to fly? Too bad. Sorry, DH.
Wendy
Xpeng’s AeroHT. $280k. Includes truck it folds into.
3 Likes