Forget the Cost of Learning to Fly, Think Value

Forget the Cost of Learning to Fly, Think Value

You’ve obviously thought of learning to fly or you wouldn’t be here right now. Spend a little time reading Richard Bach’s classic Jonathan Livingston Seagull and I guarantee you’ll be putty in the hands of any flight instructor who offers you a demo flight. You may not even need an airplane.

OK, back to reality … where everyone remembers how damned expensive it is to learn to fly. Blah, blah, blah.

Really?

Cost Vs. Value

Forget what everyone else has told you about why no one learns to fly anymore and prepare your mind for a few fresh ideas.

When you stroll around a new-car showroom or troll the Internet for a set of wheels, is cost the only thing on your mind? I doubt it. If it were, how could Toyota, GM, Honda and the rest have sold all those electric cars? They’re way more expensive than my gas-driven Mini Cooper, the one I’ve been driving for 10 years now … with no payments for the last six. If you’re outside the 1%, you probably think about buying a car in terms of the number of monthly payments before that baby’s yours.

Consider school today. The cost of our daughter’s college is enough to melt the brains of people who don’t have kids. Luckily she’ll only be 22 when she graduates which means she’ll have many years ahead to add her two cents to the entertainment world she loves based on her education.

When we talk flying though, everyone zeroes in on the cost per hour and little else.

But what if we treated learning to fly like a college education or a new car and amortized the cost … spread it out over a few years. What happens next is simply magical. The price of learning to fly begins to look affordable as the raw dollar issue slips to the back of your focus much like minimizing a tab on a browser. You know it’s still there, but it’s just not staring you in the face every moment of the day.

Jim Knollenberg told me the other day that earning a private pilot certificate today, start to finish, probably runs between $10,000 to $12,000. He’s president of Pilot Finance Inc., an Illinois-based company that finances both the private pilot certificate and the instrument rating for the short of cash.

Maybe The Only Thing Stopping you is … YOU

Knollenberg reminded me that anyone here in the U.S. with a job and decent credit can, after paying a small down payment, cover the cost of learning to fly in monthly installments of $250-$300 per month over the course of four or five years. That’s about what you’d pay for a new car.

So let’s change the conversation a bit, from talking about cost, to thinking about the value of that private pilot certificate. Unlike an auto, your pilot certificate doesn’t rust and it can’t be destroyed in a wreck. It never expires either. You only need three takeoffs and landings every 90 days to retain the privilege of flying a single engine airplane.

If you’re 25 or 30 when you learn to fly and continue flying throughout your life … let’s say until you’re 70, break down that $12,000 you spent over the course of 40 years. A little quick math shows me that’s about $300 per year.

What you really need to ask yourself right now, I think, is whether you can drive an old car a bit longer to finance that dream of learning to fly instead, knowing you’ll be flying for the rest of your life once you’ve finished paying off the loan. Or thing of the anguish you’ll avoid … like the pain of being 77 someday and realizing you really could have afforded to fly if you’d done a bit more research.

So maybe flying’s not quite as out of reach as you thought?

Fly Safely,

Rob Mark, Publisher