Originally Posted by
Nil Flaps
But given you're a fairly successful businessman in your forties, you can afford it.
I wish
Like most people my age, I have substantial outgoings -- the mortgage company takes most of my earnings and the kids (bless 'em) take the rest. All my expenditure has to be approved by the domestic financial planning committee, i.e., my wife. I'm not short of money, despite the mortgage, etc., but my family all have ideas how it should be deployed -- dull things that don't involve flying, like holidays, school trips, extensions to the house, saving for university fees, the usual stuff.
I have negotiated the expenditure of 6,000 pounds on flying over the next 12 months. Taking out the cost of equipment, examination fees, insurance, books, etc., leaves me with enough for about 40 hours of Cessna172+instructor time. I'll probably be able to get, say, 1,000 pounds per year after that.
My original plan was to spend the six grand all at once on lessons -- at least two a week -- in the hope of qualifying for a PPL before it ran out, and accept that I might then not be able to fly again for a year. But from what other people have said, that increasingly sounds like a bad plan. I've been quite surprised, from the preceeding posts, how long most people take to get to qualifiying standard. Even if I were more-than-usually competent, and I have no reason to think I am, it seems that hoping to qualify in 40 hrs is optimistic. In any event, combined with my work obligations and decreasing hours of daylight, the crappy weather at the moment is limiting me to one flight a week.
I'm coming around to the idea that spreading my expenditure over a longer period of time is more sensible. I could certainly afford one hour's flying every 2-3 weeks for the foreseeable future, but that means it would be several years at least before I got to PPL qualifying standard, if I ever did; and being the driven, goal-directed kind of person I am, that's a hard nut to swallow.
But life is about compromises, I guess.