The Stingy Pilot

Disclaimer How much does it cost to learn to fly? It turns out that this is a pretty complicated question to answer and no two people will tell you the same thing. In fact, I suppose you could say that most of this blog is going to be devoted to answering this question, so I won't attempt to make a complete answer in this post. The total cost of getting a pilot's license is dependent on the individual, the location, the year, the instructor, what sort of license you're getting, and many many other factors. In this post, I am just going to explain the basic things you will likely be paying for. I will throw in some numbers, but that's just to give you a ballpark estimate of the price. The actual price you will pay will be different depending on where you live, and of course theres no way of telling what the prices will be several years from now. For the sake of this post, we'll just be talking about the Private Pilots License (PPL). There are other licenses that we...

This doesn't necessarily fit into the scope of this blog. But I carved a pumpkin for halloween this year and I'm very proud of it so I wanted to share it with my readers. Here it is, and F-35B Lightning II And in case you're curious, this is what it looks like in the light. Doesn't look as good this way, but you can get a little bit of a better feel for how I did it.

Before you begin your pilot training or make any other big financial decision regarding aviation, you must consider what your mission is. There is no single right way to be a pilot and the decisions that each individual must make largely depend on what he or she wants to get out of flying. There are countless things you can do with aviation and there's no sense focussing your training on any of the aspects of aviation that really aren't that important to you. So before you start looking at any flight schools or planes or airports or anything, take a moment and decide what your mission is. It might even help to write it down and prioritize the various parts of your mission. The purpose of this post is to give you some ideas of what sort of questions you might ask yourself and to give you some ideas of what sorts of things you might want to do as a pilot so that you can decide how important each one is to you specifically. One of the first things you should ask yourself is ...

Before we dive into topics about how to save money on aviation, I wanted to give my readers some background on myself and why I'm interested in aviation. If you don't care about me and just want to hear advice on flight training, go ahead and skip this post. Stay tuned though, I promise my later posts will be less personal and more applicable to all of the other stingy pilots out there. There's no explaining why we as aviation enthusiasts have a need to fly; sure we'll try to justify it by saying its a quick way to get from one place to another, but its really a lot more than that. We are inflicted with a disease which pilots refer to as "the bug" and once we're infected, we just have to get up in the air. I can't say for sure when I contracted the bug, but it was before I can remember. I have pictures that show of me snuggling my fighter jet blanket (with F-14s and F-4s and I can't remember what else) when I was still young enough to be using ...

I don't think there's anyone in the world who has never dreamt of flying. For most people, its just a silly fantasy that they never really plan on fulfilling; most of us dream about being a super hero too, but that doesn't mean we devise a plan to become one. However, for many people, there comes a day when they think to themselves, "Hey, maybe I actually could do that." They discover that flying people don't just consist of airline pilots, fighter pilots, stunt show pilots, and super heroes, but also just normal, run of the mill everyday people who you wouldn't even know were pilots if you didn't ask them. They aren't filthy rich, they don't do it for their career, they  don't have any special powers, but yet, they've realized the dream of flying which most people will never accomplish. So, a dreamer decides to look into what it takes to learn to fly. They google it, walk up to a flight school, or ask a pilot friend and here roughly ...