Would like to learn to fly, but...

Peter R. wrote:

On 5/11/2007 2:26:52 PM, Ron Hardin wrote:

I have 1200 hours, from many years of flying, age 16 to 30, when
I gave it up out of boredom.

Two words: Angel Flight

Many have expressed that volunteering for Angel Flight has reinvigorated the
excitement of flying.

--
Peter

In other words, in fact, mostly it becomes pointless, particularly when compared with
other uses for your time.

Points of contact between actual flying and what the childhood idea of it is, are
very few ; occasionally they meet again, but very infrequently, and in ways hard to
repeat.

Setting some goal is a help in maintaining interest. In my own case, I got really,
really good at gusty crosswind landings, and incredibly steep slip-to-landing approaches
when that wasn't available. But you run out of things you can perfect without killing
yourself, eventually.

Ham radio operators have the same burnout. The surviving ones often imagine themselves
serving in some vastly important communications role, which is hard for me to imagine but
they convince themselves, which is all that counts, I guess.

I happened to find that long distance bike riding was a better use of weekend time -
after a couple hundred miles on a weekend, which was typical, you actually feel you've
been somewhere.

Adding things up, I've accumulated about 100,000 miles flying and 300,000 miles biking.
The biking has a sort of build-in goal that you can commute to work with it, and do
every chore, just about, as well.

Hmm.. http://home.att.net/~rhhardin4/odyssy9.jpg

--
Ron Hardin


On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.

However I'm
having a bit of trouble reconciling this desire with my concern about
CO2 emissions and climate change.


There are many recreational activities that probably have a smaller CO2
footprint. However, these things are awfully hard to calculate through
to the end. And then there are all other kinds of other possibly
negative impacts for any human activity: pollution with other stuff,
somehow indirectly furthering poverty in Africa, exploiting cheap labor
in India or China, whatever.

In the end, if you think it through, all recreational activities are
superfluous with regard to ecology. Where do you want to stop? That's
something only you can decide.

--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)

On May 11, 8:23 am, wrote:
Having become dangerously addicted to MS Flight Simulator, I am
starting to develop a hankering to learn to fly for real. However I'm
having a bit of trouble reconciling this desire with my concern about
CO2 emissions and climate change. My wife and I tend to buy reasonably
fuel efficient cars and are soon to have a wind turbine installed on
our house, so to start burning aviation fuel just for fun would seem
like a bit of a step in the wrong direction.

Can anyone provide any insights to help me allay these concerns? I
don't even know how much fuel the average light aircraft consumes or
how much CO2 it puts out into the atmosphere. Is it comparable to a
car or is it a lot more? (My car gets about 50mpg, but then I spend a
lot more time driving it than I could ever afford to spend flying a
plane.)

Thanks in advance,
Colin