Cost of ownership

Matt Herron Jr. wrote:

snip
Scheduling for me is the biggest hurdle. It's hard enough to get good
soaring weather and a day off to overlap.

snip
It is true that 1/2 time ownership
should give you plenty of flying hours, if only you could pick and
choose the hours you wanted.

Which brings me back to the topic of this thread; I want my own
glider. And given the excellent financial analysis done by several
posters, especially concerning the lost opportunity cost of the cash
tied up in the glider, I can't justify it on financial grounds. How
about needy, selfish, emotional grounds? Hmmm, also kind of a tough
sell. Oh well, a boy can dream, can't he?
Here's another dream solution to your problems: a self-launching sailplane.

It makes some things a lot easier, in several ways:

* you don't need to show up early or wait in a long line for a tow.
Just show up, rig, and go.
* you don't need to fly from an airport with a towplane, so you can
fly from a closer, more convenient airport.
* you don't need a day with widespread, predictable lift to go
cross-country, because you can cross blue holes, shadowed areas,
or recover from a bad guess about the lift with a few minutes of
motor operation.
* all the above make it easier to share th glider with a partner,
and still get in plenty of flying.

Owning a motorglider means more money to purchase the same soaring
performance, more maintenance, and higher insurance cost because of the
higher price. It also means more complexity for the pilot, and more
responsibility, because you are now the towpilot, too. You have to
decide if the ability to fly more and to explore more is worth the cost.

If you want to know more about owning and flying a motorglider, I
suggest starting with "A Guide to Self-launching Sailplane Operation",
downloaded from www.motorglider.org

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
* Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly