PPC notes
Out on the beach with Lucetta, the whippet, on a windy Tuesday noon-time, a day that’s really too cold for this sort of thing. There must be 200 people or so down the length of the beach, each cluster spread out just so, assuring some privacy and a sense of alone time at the beach. I tried to walk a ways with Cetta, but the old girl just isn’t up to it anymore. Instead, she lies at my feet partially wrapped up in a blanket. There’s a great deal for her to see here, and to smell, these two senses being her final way to explore this beach wonderland.
Back to PPCs and PPGs, the abbreviations for the two aircraft types I am considering. I got an email from the man who took me up on Saturday laying out the price of learning to fly. Not sure I am going to proceed, but am leaning heavily in that direction. For the sake of this conversation let’s just say it will happen.
Let’s take a step back to the part 104 versus PPC for a moment, as I am still not certain about which path to take. My friend Dan considers the Sport Pilot path somewhat burdensome, filled with far too many regulations to be a reasonable path, especially when compared to the unregulated nature of the part 104 type. I’ll have to ask him to explain that a bit more, as the only bottom line difference I notice is the initial $1500 in additional training, and then an additional $100 a year for the bi-yearly check ride. That $1500 is nothing to sneeze at, as few of us have that lying around with us just looking for a way to spend it. The $200 bi-yearly check ride, on the other hand, seems money well spent, a small price to pay for training and regulatory updates. While these craft are pretty safe, it just makes sense to do all that you can to remain the best pilot possible.
Once you have gotten your training, no matter which path you take, you are still free to choose a Part 103 or a Sport Pilot license aircraft. One of the advantages of going for the sport pilot license is that it allows you to rent a two seat aircraft any time you want to take passengers up.
That actually seems like a pretty good path, Sport Pilot, only renting a two seat PPC as needed to take others up, allowing me to save considerable funds by purchasing a single seat aircraft for my own use. Let’s do the math on this. Let’s assume I would save $7000 on the purchase of a new single seater versus a new 2 seater. At $75 an hour in rental fees that $7000 would allow me more than 93 hours of two seater rental! The savings would be far less on a used craft, but I could still most likely pay for at least 40 hours of dual flight time. Assuming the purchased two seater would have resale value at the end, one might assume that much of that value would be consumed by maintenance and consumable costs such as gas and oil. Seems like a no brainer, though I am probably missing something as a newbie.
So why not rent a single seater as opposed to buying one? It may make total sense, too, but at they don’t have any of them to rent out at this point. Speaking of which, what if I bought a single seater and rented it out, thereby helping to pay for my purchase? It’s a possibility I guess, though it would take 400 and some rentals to totally pay my costs, not including insurance, which could be prohibitive if it is used as a rental.
So where does this leave me? At this point I would proceed with the training, not making any purchase until I lose the weight I have set as a goal, made sure that I am really interested, and then saved the money in order to proceed. That could be well over a year from now. If I saved $300 a month and combined that with the cash I have on hand now, I could buy a very nice single seater in two years. Sigh.
