How Do You Find the Resources for Flying

I was born in a relatively wealthy and aviationminded family, I can fly the ‘family aircraft’ under very friendly conditions. Time is currently the limiting factor with my wife and two young daughters (<3yrs). I work three days a week as a candidate civil-law notary – doesn’t pay as much as one may think – the rest of the weekdays and much of the weekend go in to caring for my little girls. Although my wife hasn’t flown with me (yet), she supports my hobbies when she can. I usualy fly 40/50 hrs a year SEP and about 15 launches in gliders to keep my license.

You can always find time and money, but if you also fancy wife, kids, family, job, house etc (life)

Ouch. According to this definition, LeSving, I hardly have a life – ergo I can fly. Some truth to that – but let me take the liberty to add that although no wife, kids, house – I do have a life outside of flying and work, too.

Currently I am training for IR and during the period of this training (theory and practice) I reduced my work

I love this about the Swiss work/life model! I experienced this when I first stayed in Switzerland for a longer time. Partial work is much more common than, say, in Germany. It is perfectly normal for people to mention the % of how much they work and jobs are even advertised like that (70%). Here, people will look at you oddly, unless you’ve just made a baby…

live in a small flat instead of a decent house

Check. I even recommenced sharing my apartment again, like in the good old student days. Coincidentally, I did this roundabout after I started flying… Reduces my rent by 50% (that alone buys 4 hours of flying/month) and my flatmate is good looking, too.

not go on vacation or stay in the general area

Why fly then?

This is an interesting thread! Good to read everyone’s stories! So here’s my deal: I work as an IT consultant. Though I am regularly employed by a consulting firm (rather than working freelance, which is always an interesting option in this field), I have a good degree of freedom in terms of when I’m where. I’m mostly on client engagements throughout Germany or Europe. Usually, I’ll spend the better share of the work week at one location – like Bern or Hamburg, for the past couple of months. This year, I’ve started to occasionally fly myself (once to Bern, after the Lausanne fly-in, and now this week to Hamburg, albeit now here with a grounded plane and the German railways on strike.. different story). This is not strictly in line with company policy. Later, I’ll claim the expenses as if I’d come by car. This is still a pain point and I’ll try to change this in the future. I’ll need to catch one of our board members over a beer, I suppose. By being somewhat flexible with the days I spend at the client (it’s okay to leave a day earlier or later, as long as no fixed meetings are concerned, obviously), I have the buffer I need for VFR flying.

Apart from those work related trips I do local sightseeing trips around Düsseldorf with friends often. Lacking family and kids, I have a pretty ok network in terms of loose friends/people who still want to come flying with me one day. I sometimes do this on a cost-sharing basis, which helps reduce the financial impact of this – especially if people ask me to go flying. When I invite people on my own initiative for a short flight, I will not ask them for money, usually – unless foreigners on some online platform, which I’d usually ask to contribute somewhat. Also, when planning longer trips with friends, we’ll share all the costs (flying, accomodation, food, …).

These days, I have entirely lost interest in vacation trips where self-flying is not an option. This is putting stress on some relationships with friends who I used to travel with together before flying.

I think, following Patrick’s post above, another reason we find the average PPL to be 50+ (a lot older at many places actually; I think the CAA-published age distribution is skewed downwards by the number of young PPL holders who give up soon afterwards) is that in so much of N Europe people kill themselves to achieve some self-determined standard of living, and this leaves them with little time to pursue “frivolous” hobbies like flying. As a result, most people I know dislike their job, which is a pity since they spend most of their waking hours doing it. And being married to someone who doesn’t share that hobby (the usual pilot marriage) is a sure way to getting stuck into a rut where you have to work to maintain that standard of living.

Whereas a single person has a lot more options and, as posted earlier, if you keep your trousers zipped up at the appropriate junctures in your life, and have a reasonable job, you can do an awful lot of flying.

Unfortunately, for various strange reasons, many men choose a woman who doesn’t share their main interests. Reminds me of Rod Stewart

Just my opinion, you understand…

Reviving this thread after I read it.

Interesting points made here. My takeaway is that most of us, with a few exceptions, have just enough money or time to afford flying, but still do it. I mean it is not as affordable as just taking your car and going somewhere, for most of us. To be in that situation one would have to be a millionaire.

I personally have a job that pays good, I’m not married and have no kids. My car is an old Saab from 21 years ago, although some times I wonder if it would be cheaper in the long run getting a newer car that breaks down less often, and I live in a small village renting a cheap apartment.

However, I still cannot see myself, in the foreseeable future, being in a situation where I can afford owning a plane. I like to always have a financial buffer on the side in case things go south, and many times things have gone south. I could of course use the future accumulation of that buffer for flying, but that would make me less comfortable with my living situation. I think many people here that own airplanes don’t think like that and their total annual expenses are more or less equal to the total annual income.

Therefore, I think I will stick to my current situation, which is flying with rental aircraft from the local flying club whenever I feel like I have enough financial buffer aside to do so. This restricts of course the type of flying I can do, I cannot really go places for long time, but I could not go places for long time anyway since I have to be here to work during week days.

Dimme wrote:

I like to always have a financial buffer on the side in case things go south, and many times things have gone south. I could of course use the future accumulation of that buffer for flying, but that would make me less comfortable with my living situation. I think many people here that own airplanes don’t think like that and their total annual expenses are more or less equal to the total annual income.

It is never good to overextend but I would offer one comment: If you know what cash reserve makes sense, and have it in hand, spending what you earn is fine but the idea should be to spend some of the surplus on conservative investments. That’s how you can eventually fund your plane. Saving excess cash is not a good idea, if you have a surplus.

I’m a physics professor but my whole career has been one short term contract after another. Ran an online business for a while as a backup, the recent sale of which allowed me to buy a plane. Looks like I might become (semi)-permanent soon, finally.
We bought our house in the lowest month of massive recession so our mortgage is very small. I will probably eventually sell a half share in my plane because basically all of my disposable income goes into it, and I’d like to hold some back to stock up the wine cellar :)
Have 2 small kids which restricts my flying time for sure, but looking forward to next summer when I should have a decent bit of free time to get some hours in once the university year ends.

Silvaire wrote:

spend some of the surplus on conservative investments

I don’t gamble a.k.a invest money. Some wise person once said you should never invest more than you’re willing to lose, and many Greeks will agree with that statement. I’m not willing to lose anything, not even a cent. Yes I know that not investing costs money because of inflation yada yada… and I am comfortable paying that cost for the security it provides.

The only thing I would ever invest is my own skills.

Dimme wrote:

The only thing I would ever invest is my own skills

Unless you are exceptionally highly skilled (maybe you are, what do I know ) you can’t accumulate anything with that philosophy. I started by investing $10K in a shared property, not a huge amount of money to risk even at age 25. When the market decreased for a while my partner sold out to me for $1K. It’s now worth about $300K more than we paid for it when I was 25.

To answer the OP’s title question, right now I simply don’t: I haven’t flown for three months. During this time I moved, changed my employer and got my older son into childcare. Right now my days are fully filled with working in the hospital, taking care of my children and sleeping.

I guess this is the main reason why many young pilots quit flying: not EASA, airfield politics, big club personalities or shady maintenance businesses! Flying is simply a hobby too expensive and time-consuming for most people between say 25 and 40 who also want a decent family life, children and buy a house someday…