many of the individuals would be unable to fly in a Sharia society as they would be unable to hold anything!
I love that
Had to think about it for a while though....
I was able to buy a new plane in 2002, but if I was doing it again but with a smaller budget I would spend all available energy in trying to assemble a group around some plane of good quality.
I now know it would not have been easy, because most people I trained with left aviation almost immediately they got the PPL, but this has got to be the best way.
Buying into a group is the next best thing but it brings a set of gotchas. Some can be quite subtle and really impossible to establish up front unless you really know what to look for (like aircraft availability patterns). Also very few groups provide properly for the engine fund, etc. And probably none provide for "major suprise" Annual costs; these can be pretty substantial on an old plane. I know of a group around a C150 which often had £7000 Annuals, but they had ~25 members to share the cost so nobody was really bothered about money, and that kind of a group probably represents the far end of syndicates - so cheap it doesn't matter but obviously mostly made up of very low annual hour pilots.