Mooney_Driver wrote:
I could be evil now and say quite a few pilots who have plenty of time to fly are single…….
Single or older.
If you have children and a spouse and a job (and a spouse with a job), you have to plan your activities well. I might be able to go flying with my buddies on the weekend and leave the wife with the kids at home but that wouldn’t be the right thing to do. There is a limit to “solitary” free time activities when one has a family. The best way is to include the family but that is not so easy, especially since the enthusiasm to fly in a GA airplane is in most cases very limited among the rest of the family. Also with 2 or more kids in school, there are an average 2 birthday etc. parties per weekend that the children have to attend and there is no way to convince them to skip even a single 
You need time and money. There are phases in life where you have one of them. I believe for most people at 50+, there is the highest chance to have both. I would estimate that about 90% of the active pilots at my airfield are either single or have no kids or 50+.
achimha wrote:
You need time and money. There are phases in life where you have one of them. I believe for most people at 50+, there is the highest chance to have both.
Well, I am 54 and I can afford my plane. Where I am critically short of is time right now. But hopefully once my little one is a bit older we’ll have a great time flying together as a family.
I’m 50 with grown kids and wife who’s not in horse riding so I tick all the boxes.
Half the nursing staff round where I live keep horses, despite most of them not being particularly well off. It clearly helps to live on a farm.
Emir wrote:
I’m 50 with grown kids and wife who’s not in horse riding so I tick all the boxes.
In 20 years when I’m there, there won’t be any fuel left around to do any flying :P
Hopefully electric airplanes are a mainstream thing by then. If electricity doesn’t become as expensive as fuel we might even get more affordable flying by then!
Dimme wrote:
Hopefully electric airplanes are a mainstream thing by then. If electricity doesn’t become as expensive as fuel we might even get more affordable flying by then!
It will have to become at least as expensive as fuel currently is because, assuming there are no more oil based fuels available, there will first of all be a deficit from fuel duties to be made up and secondly the infrastructure to allow recharging of all these batteries, included the associated power stations, will need to be built. That last part, building new power stations, will probably be the most challenging part. Without having cars / aircraft switching to battery power, energy demand is expected to increase from 100GW (2014) to 130GW in 2030 and 140GW in 2035.
That means 15 new Hinkley Point C power plants to be built even if we ignore decommissioning of other stations in the mean time…..
….. now add to that the power requirements for all the cars, lorries and planes in Britain…. where is that capacity coming from? And who will pay for it? And how?
If your spouse flies, too, family time and flying time is essentially the same. And together you can share costs :-)
To be honest, I ma not interested in what my aviation costs, aslong as I can pay the bills.
Well, this describes my situation 
Thank you everybody for participating in the survey. We had an amazing participation of 129 pilots! The greater the data set the better the statistics =)
I will, for now, simply post the results as Google Forms presents it. Later today I will analyse the data set manually and try to find interesting correlations, e.g. whether A/C owners earn more than A/C renters, what kind of pilots fly more, what kind of pilots fly less, etc… Give me ideas of statistics that you want to see.
I will only post graphs here that do not identify any people and look somewhat nice. Google Forms could not create a graph of the annual disposable income because of the wide spread of the numbers, but I can say that the average is 80 000 EUR and the median is 50 000 EUR, with a minimum of 1 EUR (probably wealthy people that don’t need to work) and a maximum of 1 000 000 EUR (probably wealthy people that do work).
Also, please take these results with a grain of salt. They have not been verified in any way, so don’t start going nuts trying to find the richest guy in the forum.
The legend in this one does not work so well. 67.7% is Normal / Utility, 10.8% is Experimental and 12.3% is Ultralight with conventional controls.
Here the yellow and the blue are both “Privately”. The reason they appear as separate is a spelling error I corrected mid-survey.
Those are amazing (though to me not surprising) stats. They show the level of experience here on EuroGA. But it also shows the wide range of experience, from low to high.
