No matter how expensive a home sim you make, it won’t ever get be even a quarter of what an actual entry amateur plane costs to buy and maintain. It’s not even the plane itself either, it’s all the recurring costs like storage, maintenance, spare parts, fuel, certification fees, taxes, etc. The only cheap flight option for a recreational pilot is bushcraft light planes. And they will still cost more than the sim setup, while you’ll only be able to fly it on certain places, during certain weather, at certain times of the year. The rest of the time you’ll still have to pay all the storage and maintenance fees. Planes are incredibly expensive.
Yeah, you’ll be able to actually use it when life allows you, vs restructuring your whole life around being able to fly.
Now we just need one for where millionaires think their work is saving the world. Apparently the city building sims aren’t sufficient.
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/
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.
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.
There’s heights and there heights. The common fear is of heights that are large enough for a fall to cause serious injury, and not too large to be out of range for biological fall protection
I used to be afraid of heights, but trained myself out of it as an adult. I had trouble abseiling, walking on elevated walkways, standing near windows in tall buildings
Three things I never had a height problem with:
- Front seat of a plane (or any other seat, for that matter)
- Basket of a balloon
- On top of a tall hill
I have some fear of heights and for some reason it doesn’t get triggered when flying on a plane, even on a prop-plane a km or two above the ground.
High up in tall buildings or mountain or coastal cliffs, sure, planes, not at all.
It’s not exactly rational.
If you’re not actually afraid of flying when on a commercial flight, I bet you won’t either when at the commands of a poky prop-plane.
I looked into getting a pilots license and a plane once thinking maybe it would be more fun than flying commercial.
The license to fly just a dinky Cessna would be expensive af and I would only be able to afford a Cessna from 1982 or some shit anyway AND they only have a range of like 300 miles or some shit.
To actually go anywhere beyond my state I’d need a private jet license which is even more expensive takes a while and WAY outside of affordability.
Ah well guess I’m stuck driving or flying commercial
I fucking love the dedication people put into their sin rigs. Their joy makes me so happy, even more so when it’s related to their real work. This guy is a trucker and recreated his entire cabin for his American Trucker sim. He’s my fucking hero: https://youtube.com/shorts/EmpAJR5lNuQ?si=Z324Z-M_pGG_9Bp-
Wet lease? Yeah, clubs and leasing are an accessible option but depends on what you want to do. Flying a tiny 182 Cessna, sure will be as much as a nice Sim setup. For one flight, at $200 an hour, roughly 25 hours of flight or thereabouts and you’re already over the price of the simulator.
Fly commercial jets, like the one this picture is simulating? No way. A small Citation jet starts at $50k a month. That’s probably already 5 times the cost of equipment in that photo. And you can fly the big birds and do crazy stuff with them in the sim.
Indeed.
Back when I was making extra good money I got some flying lessons and started dreaming about it and eventually figured out the costs (bad enough the upfront ones, way worse the running costs) for a shitty-shit plane that wasn’t even exciting to fly.
Also the physical setup in the picture looks like it’s emulating large commercial passenger planes (don’t really know enough to guess which, though) and those planes cost millions of dollars.
All that hardware and then just… a chair.
VR headset would be best view but then they couldn’t see all the fancy controls around them.
Even better if they could do it with AR. Then they could blend the controls with the view.
This is exactly what I was looking at. What the hell is with that?
Guy probably could have purchased an entire office worth of chairs with the money he spent on all that gear… He didn’t even bother to get one decent chair?
They were making the point that it looks like a chair you would pick up for free on the side of the road as part of a multi thousand dollar flight sim
Most people mention the costs of owning aircraft vs a sim, but there’s another possible reason: health. People come in different shapes and forms and not everyone who loves aviation is able to get II or even III medical class. So flight simulation is their only option to be a “pilot”.
I mean, on VATSIM (popular aviation simulation network) there’s a group of visually impaired people who have made a special interface so they can fly an aircraft even though they can’t see!
Simulation (of any kind) gives many people what they can’t get in any other way. And as with any other hobby, as long as it’s not damaging to other aspects of your life, let people enjoy what they want
Wait, that’s super fucking cool. Do you have a link to the way they’re able to fly blind?
To go along with this is also risk to one’s health and potentially death.
53 per 100,000 pilots was the death rate amongst pilots in 2018 according to The University of Delaware .
This doesn’t sound like a lot, until you consider it was the #2 most dangerous occupation in the US that year.
Behind #1 Loggers (111 per 100k) and ahead of #22 Police Officers (14 per 100k).
So it’s one thing to have a flight sim rig and at worst fall off your chair. A whole another thing to potentially make a mistake in an actual plane and pay the price with your life.
The double-standard on display here is just disgusting. Sure, it’s perfectly fine to modify your home entertainment system into a fake airplane but I try a little remodeling to make work feel more like home and it’s all “security will escort you off the premises” and “we’re taking away your pilot’s license”. Boils my blood.
AITA for asking my wife to respect my title a pilot?
I need the opinions of avgeeks and pilots on a matter involving my wife. I AM COMPLETELY SERIOUS AND I NEED HELP. /srs
My wife and I (together for 5 years, married for 2, no kids) have an amazing, happy relationship. I can’t recall a single time we’ve ever argued to the point of a breakup or divorce. This issue, however, is causing me to reconsider the health of our relationship. Since my wife and I have been together, I have worked as a manager for a restaurant chain. I am an extremely passionate aviation enthusiast in my free time. I have spent thousands of dollars on flight textbooks, sim gear, and even built my own a330 setup. I have never actually flown a plane or started flight training, but I have considered it for a long time. Even though my skills are not a career, I still consider myself as adept or possibly more knowledgeable than the average pilot.
That being said, here’s where the problem arises. My wife and I were invited to one of her male coworkers house for a barbecue. My wife is a senior software tech for a Covid startup. She’s worked there since 2020, a lucky catch after she was laid off from her previous job due to the virus. It was my first time meeting many of her now-close coworkers due to Covid and working from home. I had assumed she’d talked about me before, but as we were cycling through introductions I became less sure. We make our way down the line to the host of the party, a new male hire that she has grown platonically close with. We exchange casual conversation and Greg (host) asked what I do for a living. My wife chimes in with “He manages a [insert fast food chain], it certainly comes with some benefits (I’m assuming she’s referring to free food)”, in a voice that implied nothing was wrong with what she said. I very quickly corrected her and told him that I am a pilot. My wife already knows how insecure I am about my job and how I’d much rather be introduced by my hobby. I’ve earned the title of pilot through my 500+ hours on and sim and thousands of dollars put into my craft. I think it is incredibly disrespectful for her not to acknowledge my skills and training. Just because I don’t have the title of pilot on an overpriced piece of paper doesn’t mean I’m not a pilot.
I laughed it off with Greg, told him under my breath that my wife was often forgetful (which I’m sure he’s realized just from working with her). He seemed to brush it off casually. At this point, I’m fuming, but I don’t go much farther than exchanging some nasty glances at my wife for the rest of the night. As we pack into the car to leave, the argument starts. She feels as if I don’t deserve my title as a Pilot because I’m not professional. I told her she is completely insensitive to the work i’ve done and she will never understand what it’s like to study so much. She’s currently on the couch as I type this. Am I really the asshole for asking to be respected?
Wow. What a jerk off.
IMO, sounds a lot like someone trying to claim they’re a military officer after playing enough COD, or even after spending time at a range and playing thousands of hours of airsoft or something.
If you want to have a title, like pilot, go do the work and testing and fucking earn it.
