Yes and no. I bought a property with a double wide and a 5000 square foot hangar on it located on a private strip. The rent from the double wide and the other hangar spots I rent pays the mortgage and all the expenses related to the property. I own a j3 cub that I have about 30k into that I fly daily in Florida and maintain it myself for practically nothing. Affordable aviation is possible but you have to be very smart about how you go about doing it, and a good bit of luck is involved to get the right deals by being in the right place at the right time.
Oh sure, just go buy a big enough property to have a hanger and a private landing strip on it. Cheap and easy!
If you’re ok with living in the middle of nowhere, then it’s entirely doable. Some folks just have different priorities.
For instance, here is a property in Yucca Valley, CA that has a hanger in the backyard, where you can head out right on the runway from your yard. Just under $300k. There’s an entire street of houses that are adjacent to the runway of a small municipal airstrip, I think they call them fly in/fly out communities. They’re often well off the beaten path, but you don’t have to pay for storage when you have a hanger out back.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/57544-Sunnyslope-Dr-Yucca-Valley-CA-92284/17496243_zpid/
I’m not saying that those deals are bad, but we are still talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, where a sim setups is 30k or 40k at most.
You have to have the kind of life and professional occupation which is compatible with living in such a place.
Not many people have or are willing to change their lives in order to be able to fly regularly on a real plane like that. It’s like people who chose to live on a boat and sail around the World (doable, if you adjust your whole life to it and have the skill to work in the kind of occupation compatible with it).
Meanwhile a setup like the one on the picture is a lot easier to work into one’s life, even living in appartment in the middle of a city and with a 9-to-5 regular Joe job.
Never said it was easy, but I have less than 60k of my cash into everything, including a property that generates me money back. You gotta work for what you want. It’s not like I just inherited the capital to do this. I worked for it. And now I have something that will not only pay for itself but pay me as well. But go ahead and just try to hold yourself down with that thought process if you want.
Yes, but I bet that if you break down the accounting it would still be several times the cost of the setup on the photo. Home sims typically don’t carry an additional mortgage payment or a lifestyle commitment.
You would be surprised how much that setup would cost. Could easily be 30k in equipment there.
That setup is not 30k, I know because I’m a sim hobbyist. Maybe if it had a surround canopy or a motion chair, maybe, and it’s just maybe, it will start approaching 10k. Most people consider motion to be secondary and unnecessary for commercial flight simulation, and people are increasingly preferring VR over modular panels. Sim still doesn’t require uprooting your life to live in the middle of nowhere, switching careers, and going into debt to buy property and risk financial ruin with a fickle investment. It’s ok, some people are fine flying sim because they never would get to fly an Airbus IRL and wouldn’t want a job as a airline pilot to get to do it, they just want to play pretend, and that’s fine.
That’s not even counting the not small chunk of people who are actually commercial pilots who also build sim rigs in their homes.
Ok so buy a house next to a strip with your own hangar and become an airplane mechanic. How come I never thought of this?
If you’re truly passionate about flying and owning aircraft then you do what you have to do to make it happen, that’s what I did anyways. Exactly that. And I have less than 60k of investment in everything. The property generates profit now.
Fair enough, and I respect the commitment and that you share how you made it work. Without going ‘all-in’, having our own plane is a dream that’ll never go through…
(But I can imagine that even with the same commitment a lot of people wouldn’t have the opportunity to copy it - money is one thing but available property is another)
