Charles Talleyrand wrote:

There must be people on the newsgroup that fly single pilot
IFR on a regular basis. These people have a schedule to make
and would rather not miss that schedule unless necessary. These people
don't have the need to carry many passengers, but just themselves.
My question is for these people ...

What sort of planes are you flying?

I fly a Warrior II, but I have a few special factors:

1. The meetings are not too frequent, and are never more than a few hours away.
2. I'm self-employed, so I can leave a day early and stay a day late if
necessary.
3. I live close to a major airport, where I can get a last-minute full-fare
flight when I need one.

Considering these conditions, along with the fact that I have under 250
hours' flying time, it makes sense for me to fly a very inexpensive plane
and just pay for the occasional commercial airline ticket when the weather
turns on me. So far, I've had to do that once this fall (New York, during
heavy icing). The difference in operating cost between a single-engine
Cherokee ( USD 10K/year) and a pressurized twin with known ice and radar
(USD 40K/year) will pay for an awful lot of full-fare airline tickets.

On the other hand, if you have the experience and ratings and you travel to
a lot of meetings (more than one/week), your meetings are far away, you
cannot spare the occasional extra day, or you are flying between places not
well-served by commercial air service, then the high-end plane starts to
make a lot more sense. Just try putting dollar values on it: how much would
it cost you (money down and opportunity cost) to fly yourself 90% of the
time and fly commercial the remaining 10%, vs. paying the extra money to
operate a plane where you can fly yourself 99% of the time? It all depends
on how much your business time is worth.

Of course, if the goal is simply to think of reasons to buy an expensive
plane and write it off against your taxes, then feel free to disregard the
preceeding part of this posting, and have fun: you know we'll all be envying
you.


All the best,


David