In the United States, there are several million (at least) people who
if they wanted a $400,000 airplane could just write a check for it. The
article was talking about the utility of GA for business, which is what
paid for most of my flying, and the lower cost airplanes just don't
have the range or utility that a complex single has. I flew a couple of
trips with a friend who had a 172 -- it just didn't have the legs, and
if there was a broad area of IMC, one couldn't file IFR because the
requirement of reaching an acceptable alternate. I remember flying a
300 mile trip and had to make a fueling stop about half way to have
legal reserves.

On the other hand, an M20 has the legs and speed to allow the owner to
keep to a schedule. My own history, flying out of the Northeast, is
that something like 8% of the flights to meetings I might have
scheduled a week or more in advance (which mean they were not scheduled
looking at the weather forcast) had to be cancelled or postponed
because of weather. I pretty much took off if the forcast for where I
was going would allow me to fly an approach, but icing (reported by
pilots, not forcast), embedded thunderstorms, severe turbulance, those
were reasons for me to pick up the phone instead of my brain bag.

There's no question that GA is out of reach financially for a large
number of people, but we still have a few hundred thousand who can
afford to, and want to, fly.

Mx isn't one of them.


On Jan 18, 2:29 pm, Mxsmanic wrote:
Ken Finney writes:
I respectfully disagree. I worked about 18 years for an airplane company
and lived for next to a major airport for 12 years before I had ANY contact
with GA, and I expect the average person has even less knowledge. It was a
decent article, but the tone I got from it was "this is what other people,
other people who are rich, do". Once you say an airplane costs $400K, most
readers will forever consider GA as something "others" do, not something
they can do.And unfortuately, most of those readers will be right.

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