xyzzy wrote:

As someone with experience as an owner, could you (or other owners who
have experienced that) expand on that? I often think it's the opposite.
I fly 160hp Warriors in a club and often think if I owned I wouldn't
want anything less capable, but then when I look honestly at my logbook,
a pretty high percentage of my flights could just as well have have been
accomplished with much less airplane, and more fun if it was the right
airplane. Of course maybe if I were an owner instead of a renter I'd
want to go farther more often, is that what causes the mission creep?

I'm thinking about a friend who bought a 152 and wishes he had more speed. A 152
in a headwind can be frustrating if you thought your mission involved cross
country flying.

I agree we often think about family vacations when we are estimating our
mission, and then end up doing the majority of our flying either solo or with
one passenger.

In my individual experience, there were two drivers of mission creep, speed and
weight carrying capacity. I solved the speed problem by trading the Archer for
a partnership in a Mooney, but unfortunately I still have the weight limitation.
Only additional infusions of money are going to solve that, I guess, and
approaching retirement, I don't see that happening.

I started doing some paper and pencil flight planning with a hypothetical faster
airplane, and then every trip in the slower airplane seemed long. If you use
realistic winds in your fantasy flight planning, there's a big difference in
cross-country capability between a 115 knot airplane and a 150 knot airplane.
Cross-country is what I like to do. If your mission is something else, then
never mind.

The weight capacity limitation started to become obvious when I started flying
Angel Flights. I'm pretty much limited to volunteering for flights with two
clients plus baggage, and then I look for the missions with smaller passengers
(the mission volunteer form lists the passengers' weights). I end up flying a
lot of women and children, which is not all bad.


I have toyed, sometimes more seriously than other times, with purchasing
a small plane (like an Ercoupe) to use for the kind of shorter distance
or no-passengers fun flying and use club planes when I need more plane.

That might be a good plan. As you know, I have from time-to-time coupled club
membership with ownership. Well, actually my first plane was leased to a club. I
was in a club with a Lance, and I thought I would use the Lance for Angel
Flights and fly my plane otherwise. I found I wasn't flying the Lance often
enough to stay comfortably current in it, and besides, I really wanted to be
flying *my* plane, just because it was *mine*.

We have members who do that. My personal concern is keeping
proficiency in both types, particularly: if I spend so much time having
fun in an Ercoupe how good would I be at getting in the Warrior to do an
IFR flight? Also, that could be the best of both worlds but it could
also be the worst of both worlds (paying for capital and maintenance on
an owned plane while still having the availability concerns that come
with a club when I need to do more).

I save a lot of money by thinking this kind of stuff to death, rather
than acting

Works for me. Just because you buy doesn't mean you have to stop fantasizing. :-)