General Aviation as personal transportation

General aviation has not received a lot of public attention as a means of personal transportation. When most people talk of flying, the images that come to mind are large jet aircraft operated by major airlines. Flying a personally owned light airplane has generally been regarded as a recreational activity for the wealthy. While flying can be an expensive activity with a high cost of entry, with a little bit of care and attention it can be made to be a fairly economical mode of transport for appropriate trips. For example, consider the following scenario.


You and your significant other have been invited to a family event for the weekend, in a town about 500km away from where you live. Since you both work five days per week, you would have to leave on Friday and return Sunday. After work, you pack up the car, down a quick meal, and hit the road by 6pm. The drive takes about five hours, winding through various towns, around lakes, and through forests. You arrive late at night, tired from being on the lookout for various animals which like to come out on to the road at night. After spending Saturday and Sunday morning with the family, you pack up and start the return trip in the early Sunday afternoon in order to be home at a reasonable hour. The total driving time for the trip there and back was about ten hours, and cost anywhere from $100 (if you're driving a fairly economical compact) to $200 (if you're driving a large SUV) in gas. This is based on a gas price of $1.25 per litre.

The situation is a little bit different when you are a pilot of a light airplane. You head home after work, have a leisurely dinner together, and head out to the airport by 7pm. Having done the flight planning over dinner, you do a quick pre-flight inspection of the airplane and take off. Since you are traveling in a straight line in the air (more or less) instead of following the roads, the distance you need to travel is only about 400km, or 215 nautical miles. Cruising at 120 knots, you arrive in just under two hours, having enjoyed the scenery from the sky the whole way. When Sunday rolls around, you enjoy an early dinner with the family, head back out to the airport, and fly home. Including the travel time to and from the airport, you would have saved about five hours of traveling time. How much would it have cost you? A small airplane cruising at those speeds can burn as little as 5 US gallons per hour (gph) for a fairly modern ship, or around 8 gph for a thirty year old Cessna 172. At a price of $1.85 per litre (or $7 per gallon) for AvGas (100LL), that amounts to a cost of $140 to $225 for the trip.

As you can see, there are situations where flying a light airplane can be a reasonable and time saving alternative to driving. The scenario described above does make some assumptions, however. First off, the reader may notice that I only included fuel as the operating cost of both vehicles. There are other costs associated with both driving and flying, such as oil, tire replacement, engine wear, and fixed costs such as insurance and registration. While these costs exist for both vehicles, maintenance costs for aircraft are generally higher. A second assumption made is that of good weather. Small airplanes are much more sensitive to weather than automobiles, and unless a pilot has the proper training and right equipment installed in their aircraft, weather fronts can leave you grounded for many hours. Finally, there is the small issue that although most families do have a car, not very many have an airplane and a licensed pilot. The costs of entry for flying can be quite a bit higher than for driving, and most people would not be willing to make the investment.

The first cost associated with flying is that of flight lessons. Having recently done my first solo, I can attest to the fact that lessons are not cheap, quick, or effortless. Once you have tasted the thrill of being at the controls in the air, however, the motivation to overcome these barriers is easy to find. Dual instruction currently costs about $200 per hour at my current flight school, with solo practice (i.e. plane rental) coming in at about $150, including the fuel used. Most people require more than the Transport Canada minimum 45 hours of training, and there are numerous additional materials you need to buy, so you can expect the total cost for your "Private Pilot License - Aeroplane" to end up around C$10000. This is certainly more than driving lessons.

The second big cost of flying is actually owning an airplane. While you can certainly rent an aircraft for training or simply going for pleasure flights, this is not a good option if you plan to use it for actual transportation. The possible lack of availability of the aircraft when you need to go somewhere is a big inconvenience, and the costs of renting can be significantly higher than owning if you fly more than a couple of hours per month. While I won't go into too much detail about the various ownership costs for various aircraft, I will give a general breakdown of where the money goes. There are basically three categories that costs fall into - direct operating costs, fixed costs, and reserves. Direct operating costs are things that you pay for when you actually fly the plane, such as fuel, oil, and regular maintenance of the plane. With the price of AvGas at approximately $1.85 per litre right now at my airport, these costs can total from $50 per hour for a low cost, efficient aircraft, to well over $100 for more complicated aircraft with lots of avionics and a powerful motor. The fuel cost can be reduced somewhat by choosing an airplane that can run on automotive fuel (MoGas), but there are certain issues associated with that which must be considered. Fixed costs of airplane ownership include things like insurance, registration, annual inspections, and parking. These costs vary widely by region and airplane type, and can range from a couple hundred per month to a few thousand per month. It is important to choose the right airplane for the type and amount of flying you do, there is no point in having an aircraft suck money out of your bank account and not be used. Finally, reserves are the money you set aside for major overhauls of various parts of the plane. Unlike cars, unpressurized airframes can last almost indefinitely but things like engines and propellers have Time Between Overhaul (TBO) figures set out by manufacturers which must be followed. These reserves can add an additional $10 to $20 per flight hour to your operating costs.

There are many ways to reduces the costs of training and airplane ownership, but I will not get into them in this post. Look for future posts on these topics.