flown once (for a reason) with a flying school up at durham tees. On take off the door popped off the latch thing mid winter so i put the heater on full - not that it worked (i only had a t-shirt on) and proceeded to freeze my bollocks off. The radio stack in the aircraft could only be described as pre-historic to the point it took me a minute to work out how to switch it on and the general keep of the machine was terrible. Pity the cost per hour didnt reflect this. The transponder i fear didn't work (interesting conversation with durham radar)
On the other hand, the school where i learnt to fly had relatively newish machines, no older than 10 years or so and what a difference. Yes they had the scars of training but fly very nicely bar one of them which has had a re-paint and the lazy buggers haven't stripped the old paint off, thus making it very heavy.
Used to be a part of a cherokee 140 group and the machine was built in the mid 70's. Still perfectly fine although i found it under powered and slow despite its high fuel burn. Didn't like the old style yokes but otherwise felt perfectly safe in it.
I find it incomprehensible that its so difficult to invent new engines for the likes of warriors and 152's etc that are cheap to run and actually get certified to fly. I understand that theres a new diesel out on the market? although to upgrade that in a warrior, how many hours would have to be done to justify the upgrade?
Im personally at the stage where I want my own aircraft and although I wish to have an IFR capable machine, I don't want the stigma of a high fuel burn issue to go with it.
I think one of the biggest issues here is the fuel cost, the flying schools have their overheads and so on, and i see the point of training machines being work horses and therfor not worthy of a bit of TLC.
I was speaking to a chap involved in aviation and he seemed to think that avgas wasnt going to be around for much longer, what then?
Dan