We're getting old, folks...

Ken Hornstein - CONTRACTOR wrote:
So, I think that when I learned, the 152 the school I had was something
like $79/hr (I see that it's up to $89/hr now). My instructor rates
were $30/hr. That's pretty reasonable, considering the difference in
cost-of-living between our locales.


I learned how to fly in 1978. Back then, a C-152 went for $24.50/hour and an
instructor was $15/hr. C-172s were $31/hr, IIRC.



You say it takes 55 hours to get your private. But I scheduled two
flights, every week, and it took me around 80. According to some of
the web pages I've seen, 75 is the national average, which means I'm at
least within a standard deviation. So I don't think 55 hours is a fair
amount of time for the _average_ person.


I got my private license in 44 hours, flying 2-3 times a week. I started in
10/78 and finished in 2/79... flying through what passes for winter weather in
the Carolinas. When I hear of people taking 75 hours, all I can think is that
they waited too long between flights and had to spend the first part of every
flight going over what they forgot from the one before. And if I had to assign
a cause, I'd blame it on money. It cost me about $1100 to earn my license,
which sounds pretty cheap these days. What you have to remember is that a nice
new car could be bought in 1978 for $6000 or so. What would you spend today?

I remember an old fellow scoffing at my $1100. "Hell", he said, "I paid $600 to
learn how to fly". Of course when he learned how to fly you could buy a brand
new VW Beetle for around $2500. It's all relative.



--
Mortimer Schnerd, RN

VE

A 152 isn't a plane you can learn in if you're a fatass.

Boy, THAT is for sure. I didn't fly in a 152 until last year (I trained in
Cherokee 140s), and my co-pilot was a 250 pound guy.

We got to know each other a *lot* better than I wanted... ;-)

You say it takes 55 hours to get your private. But I scheduled two
flights, every week, and it took me around 80.

Well, I scheduled three flights each week, and averaged twice, with weather
being the main problem. (I trained in Wisconsin, in winter, in '94-'95.
Not the brightest thing I've ever done...) I was an early flight simulator
aficionado, so controlling an airplane was second nature to me, which
(according to my instructor) made things go very quickly, initially. I
soloed in less than 7 hours.

Did you take 80 because of on-again/off-again training, or some other
factor? It seems like a lot, with a dedicated flight training schedule.
(It seems pretty quick, if you were doing the old "whenever I've got a few
extra bucks I'll take a lesson" method.)

So, I'm curious ... assuming it still would have still taken me 80
hours if I trained in Iowa City, what would that have cost me in a 172 in
your neck of the woods? It doesn't have to be a new one; a clapped
out one is fine.

Hmm. I don't know what 172s are renting for, but I'm assuming somewhere
around $90 per hour? (For the not-so-new-ones.) More for the glass
cockpits.

How many hours did you fly with an instructor, and how many without? That
makes a HUGE difference in cost.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Jay Honeck wrote:
A 152 isn't a plane you can learn in if you're a fatass.


Boy, THAT is for sure. I didn't fly in a 152 until last year (I trained in
Cherokee 140s), and my co-pilot was a 250 pound guy.

We got to know each other a *lot* better than I wanted... ;-)


You say it takes 55 hours to get your private. But I scheduled two
flights, every week, and it took me around 80.


Well, I scheduled three flights each week, and averaged twice, with weather
being the main problem. (I trained in Wisconsin, in winter, in '94-'95.
Not the brightest thing I've ever done...) I was an early flight simulator
aficionado, so controlling an airplane was second nature to me, which
(according to my instructor) made things go very quickly, initially. I
soloed in less than 7 hours.

Did you take 80 because of on-again/off-again training, or some other
factor? It seems like a lot, with a dedicated flight training schedule.
(It seems pretty quick, if you were doing the old "whenever I've got a few
extra bucks I'll take a lesson" method.)


So, I'm curious ... assuming it still would have still taken me 80
hours if I trained in Iowa City, what would that have cost me in a 172 in
your neck of the woods? It doesn't have to be a new one; a clapped
out one is fine.


Hmm. I don't know what 172s are renting for, but I'm assuming somewhere
around $90 per hour? (For the not-so-new-ones.) More for the glass
cockpits.

How many hours did you fly with an instructor, and how many without? That
makes a HUGE difference in cost.
I was just looking over my log book and it looks like I had about 80
hours or so when I took my check ride. The raw numbers don't tell the
story in my case and I bet they may not in others. The day of my
planned solo I was told by my flight school that my instructor was no
longer working there and I had to start with a new one. I was among her
first students and she wanted me to do things her way and it added
another 13 hours to my totals before I soloed. After I had soloed and
got signed off to go to the practice area and several area airports I
could fly whenever I wanted to and there were times I did just that. I
was not specifically working on any set of skills, I was just flying
around. I do think I could have cut some of those hours out but I
enjoyed them very much and that's why I was learning to fly anyway.
When it came time to take my checkride I needed to fly to a airport
about 45 min away and on my first attempt the winds had picked up during
the day and it became turbulent enough that I did not want to try to
maintain PTS standards in heading and altitude for the test. My DE
thought that my decision was a good one and so we just did the oral that
day. The flight home was bumpy but uneventful. The next 2 scheduled
checkrides were canceled due to bad weather and I did some training
flights in between to keep my skills sharp and it turned out to be a
month before the weather gods and her schedule aligned for me to take my
checkride. I guess the point of this story is that the numbers are a
guideline but you must very very careful when you draw conclusions from
them.

John

PS. After my checkride I added up the costs for getting my private and
it was about 6000 in 1998. I've never added up costs again. I just
don't want to know

Clearly, one of the biggest factors in flying is the cost.

Some, maybe. When I began my private ticket in 1973 I paid $24
per hour , dual, whcih was about a day's pay for me at that time, at 20
years old. Now, we charge about $150/hr dual, same sort of airplane,
which is a bit more than what the average 20-year-old around here
collects in a day. The difference, I suppose, is the lawyers' share.
Of course, with the oil/gas boom we're having in Alberta, there
are kids making $25 and $35 an hour, but they're buying $60,000 trucks
and big houses, not flying lessons.
Much of the big burst in flying came when the kids who were too
young to fly in WWII got old/rich enough to take lessons. They'd
watched the newsreels of the fighters and got the bug. Flying is now
more than 100 years old and the novelty has worn off for the younger
generations. Further, many of the PPLs I knew in the '70s get their
tickets, then flew another 10 or 20 hours until the family realized
that there were more urgent things to do with that money. Flying around
for an hour on a weekend gets a little stale for many unless there's a
more significant point to it.
Some of the reluctance of the public to start flying is their
perception of us as pilots. We can be arrogant and snotty, as if we're
so superior, and it turns them off. Most men would take lessons if they
had the chance; I get a lot of new aquaintances telling me they'd
always wanted to get their Private License. They seem to think that
they're somehow incomplete without having mastered it; perhaps some
discreet advertising along those lines might work. Plenty of other
sports use it.

Dan

In article aPTqf.669446$xm3.354931@attbi_s21,
Jay Honeck wrote:
Did you take 80 because of on-again/off-again training, or some other
factor? It seems like a lot, with a dedicated flight training schedule.
(It seems pretty quick, if you were doing the old "whenever I've got a few
extra bucks I'll take a lesson" method.)

There was actually no break in training. It was pretty continuous, and
I think I was pretty dedicated to it. From what I remember, there were
two factors.

- Lack of aptitude. Anything to do with book learning, I was fine. No
problems with flight planning or cross-country navigation. But the
actual stick-and-rudder stuff, I had problems with. I've always
had a problem with tasks that required coordination ... it always
took me longer to learn a physical skill than it did for anyone
else. Maybe part of it was my instructor was relatively inexperienced,
and the thing I had real problems with (landings) was something he
mastered very easily, so he couldn't really give me useful advice.
I read all of the books I could find and every newsgroup posting on the
subject and tried all of their tricks, but they didn't really help.
I flew with other instructors as well, but it didn't help. I think
it was 20 hours until I soloed. I also really liked flight simulators,
but they didn't help me one bit (nothing in real life felt like the
sim).

- We only have one DE for the area. My checkride got rescheduled a couple
of times (weather once, he got delayed once), and in the intervening
time I flew a lot to keep my skills up (and I still had a lousy
short-field landing, but the DE passed me anyway).

Hmm. I don't know what 172s are renting for, but I'm assuming somewhere
around $90 per hour? (For the not-so-new-ones.) More for the glass
cockpits.

How many hours did you fly with an instructor, and how many without? That
makes a HUGE difference in cost.

I think I had something like 20 hours of solo time by the time I got my
private (I didn't need much; the cross-country stuff was a breeze). I'd
have to check my logbook to me sure.

So, assuming $90/hr:

$115 * 60 = $6900
$90 * 20 = $1800
$8700 total.

But if I had zero hours with an instructor, it still would have cost me
$7200 ($90 * 80). Clearly the high number of hours and the 172 are what
drive the cost here.

I know everyone is going to say that 80 hours is too high, and maybe it
is. But I've seen a number of places that the national average is 75
hours (but to be fair, I've never seen the source of that statistic).
Assuming that number is accurate, that means for everybody that gets
their private in 55 hours, there's some duffer like me that's doing it
in 95 hours. Maybe most of those people are have other factors at
work, but that doesn't change the base cost.

I see that one guy recently got his Sport Pilot in a week. I doubt I
could have done that, but maybe a two-week camp would have worked for
me. Maybe there's hope for GA yet.

--Ken

In article .com,
wrote:
so superior, and it turns them off. Most men would take lessons if they
had the chance; I get a lot of new aquaintances telling me they'd
always wanted to get their Private License. They seem to think that
they're somehow incomplete without having mastered it; perhaps some
discreet advertising along those lines might work. Plenty of other
sports use it.

I've certainly had some acqaintances tell me they wished they could
take lessons; they were all male. But I think that the advertising you
need to do should be targeted toward females. Like Jay said, it's very
common that a husband likes flying, but a wife does not (I'm in that
exact situation). I've never heard of the reverse. If more wives were
into flying, it would mean more active pilots, which would have a whole
lot of positive secondary effects.

--Ken

Jose wrote:

There are a variety of reasons - one of them is that the pool of gals
who =do= like to fly is very small.

I met and married my wife long before I took my first lesson. But she
encouraged me through mine, and now I get to encourage her through hers.
So I didn't find a "gal that likes to fly"; I made one.

[I hope I do as well with my sons. The eldest's birth was early, causing me
to postpone my IR checkride. The youngest's birth was early, causing me to
postpone my long commercial XC. But perhaps that's just kids being kids,
and not reflective of their opinions regarding aviation laugh.]

Similarly, I know someone that met and married his wife before he took his
first lesson. She encouraged him through his, and then hated to fly with
him. At first, I thought it her issue. But then I experienced something
that caused me to refuse to fly with him.

I'm not saying that every person with a spouse that won't fly does things as
dangerously as that someone I know. But how careful are we to let our
spouses in, at their own speed, to this enterprise of ours?

I was speaking to a wife of a lapsed pilot recently. We were discussing the
idea of his picking up flying again. She seemed - at best - disinterested.
But after I described some of the (short by the standards of this group
{8^) trips on which I've taken my family (ie. Nantucket for lunch, which is
my favorite example for this purpose {8^), she became suddenly
enthusiastic.

With a little care, I suspect that utility carries a lot of weight. I know
that I still point out ugly road traffic over which we're flying to my
wife: "See what we're not in?".

- Andrew

Ken Hornstein wrote:

It seems people are a lot more scared of things in general than
they used to be.

I think it's cultural, but I cannot quite point out what's been causing the
drift. I know that we in the US take care at a level that is quite out of
place in many other places in the world.

There was this restaurant in Bali, for example, which had open fish tanks in
the floor. The uncareful could walk right into one (as a friend did {8^).
I cannot picture that in the US.

Admittedly, that's likely an artifact of our litigious society. But look at
school buses and seat belts for another example. Hmm...that too could be a
liability issue.

Well, what about certification requirements for aircraft? Collision lights,
shoulder belts, etc. were requirements added only relatively recently.

Fire detectors: as a kid, my homes never had anything of the sort. Now,
they're everywhere I look.

I'm not saying that the extra layers of protection we're adding are bad.
But perhaps there's something else coming along with that: an idea that we
can control the world enough to achieve the mythical concept of "Perfect
Safety".

- Andrew

Is there anything that could make Mary unwilling to fly?

Of course there is. You named a few examples, but even if you couldn't
think of any, Nature would oblige.

Medical: besides inner ear, there are vascular conditions, tumors,
nerve issues, urinary conditions, disorienting eye conditions, a
plethora of things that could make it uncomfortable, inadvisable, or
even dangerous to fly, even as a passenger...

Psychological: the obvious fear after an incident, but also an old
association coming back, changed values in a risk-reward equation, a
newfound joy in driving in traffic (or an accompanying need for time for
solitary reflection), a new hobby (winemaking, for example), the stress
of taking care of other issues, for which flying does not provide an
outlet...

Legal (the following may seem silly until you've actually been faced
with other, equally silly things that have the force of law): A law or
insurance regulation prohibiting two or more corporate officers from
flying together, Mary getting on the terrorist no-fly list (if it can
happen to a United States Senator, it can happen to you)...

Social: taking care of an elderly parent who does not want her to fly
(and who becomes much harder to deal with if she does fly), a social (or
business) calendar that pretty much requires her to stay in her home
town, a new lack of allure for distant places...

Economic:... I could go on, but won't, because it doesn't matter.

Either way, I would work very hard to help her through it.

What does this mean? If she =wanted= to fly but was unable to because
of some conditons, this may help. But if the condition is such that she
no longer =wants= to fly, then "helping her through it" really means
"helping her see it my way" (the One True Way), and is likely to have
Unintended Consequences.

But it doesn't matter =why= she couldn't or wouldn't fly any more. Take
that as a given. She won't. How does this affect your relationship
with her? With flying?

Now suppose whatever it was that happened, happened while you were
dating. Would you dump her and go looking for another girl at some hangar?

The main
advantage of owning and flying an airplane, to me anyway, is the ability to
transport my family to far-away places quickly and in great comfort. If all
I could was bore holes in the sky by myself, I would become quickly bored.

This is interesting coming from somebody who, not too long ago, was
touting aviation as the be-all and the end-all of life. To many people,
flying in an airplane is just boring holes in the sky. Going places
quickly ends up being not so quick when you add in the time spent flight
planning, preflighting (and preheating), dealing with distant FBOs, and
then add in all the hidden time (keeping current, for example). You get
to rearrange when you spend time, but the time savings in a spam can is
somewhat illusory.

At that stage I would probably sell Atlas, buy a Decathlon, and get into
recreational aerobatic flying.

Recreational aerobatic flying is also just boring holes in the sky.
Twisty holes to be sure, but holes nonetheless. And it could be that
Mary (reasonably) would not want you to partake of this (more dangerous)
part of aviation. I suppose it's not likely coming from the motorcycle
crowd, but it's possible (just imagine a slightly different Mary for
purposes of argument).

Same question.

To answer your original question, there is much more to human
relationships than sharing a cockpit, and love, if it's worth anything,
trumps flying. It certainly trumps "the ability to transport my family
to far-away places quickly and in great comfort".

Jose
--
You can choose whom to befriend, but you cannot choose whom to love.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Either way, I would work very hard to help her through it.

What does this mean? If she =wanted= to fly but was unable to because
of some conditons, this may help. But if the condition is such that she
no longer =wants= to fly, then "helping her through it" really means
"helping her see it my way" (the One True Way), and is likely to have
Unintended Consequences.

I think the basic flaw with your logic is that you're treating my wife
like a "normal" spouse. Mary isn't just another wife who might someday
decide that she doesn't want to fly with me anymore. She is a
certificated pilot, with over 500 hours as PIC, who is as skilled and
dedicated to piloting as anyone on this newsgroup.

In short, we're not talking about a woman who would suddenly decide
that wine-making was more interesting than flying, any more than you
would. It would take a very serious illness -- physical or mental --
for her to "not want to fly anymore."

But it doesn't matter =why= she couldn't or wouldn't fly any more. Take
that as a given. She won't. How does this affect your relationship
with her? With flying?

Now suppose whatever it was that happened, happened while you were
dating. Would you dump her and go looking for another girl at some hangar?

"Another girl at some hangar"? I'd like to see that hangar, someday!
:-)

In my experience, there just aren't very many chicks at the airport...

The main
advantage of owning and flying an airplane, to me anyway, is the ability to
transport my family to far-away places quickly and in great comfort. If all
I could was bore holes in the sky by myself, I would become quickly bored.

This is interesting coming from somebody who, not too long ago, was
touting aviation as the be-all and the end-all of life.

Which is why I then followed up with my statement that I would switch
to aerobatics -- the ULTIMATE "boring holes in the sky" flying!

To answer your original question, there is much more to human
relationships than sharing a cockpit, and love, if it's worth anything,
trumps flying. It certainly trumps "the ability to transport my family
to far-away places quickly and in great comfort".

Of course there is. But I believe it's safe to say that everyone on
this newsgroup is "into" aviation on a level that far surpasses the
"normal" pilot -- otherwise, why are we here? (I suppose it could be
to argue politics, but I doubt it...)

Given this level of dedication and enthusiasm to aviation, I'm still
surprised at the number of guys here who say that their spouses won't
fly with them. It's just sad.

(I've already warned my son about this phenomenon. And he's already
got it firmly in his head that if a girl doesn't like flying, that girl
doesn't warrant a second date. :-)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"