Originally Posted by
Meldex
I do not want to be a negwart BUT...
I have been approached many times by people who have the great idea that they will learn to fly, buy an aircraft, then fly 1000 mile trips every week taking the family all over the place.
Unfortunately, to get serious all weather capability and a seriously reliable despatch rate without getting the plans changed all the time because of weather, you need a de-iced multi engine aircraft and a lot of experience and qualifications.
If you want to take the family and they don't enjoy getting bumped about at low level, you need pressurisation.
To really do it right you need a turbine type.
GA is brilliant, it's my passion and interest and has been for years, but Single Engine Piston does not generally get you airline style reliability of doing the trips exactly when you want in any weather. To me GA = Fun; it can be fun going a long way, or fun flying to a farm strip 50 miles away, but it soon stops being fun when you HAVE to get there at a certain time and date and HAVE to be back at another time and date.
Meldex
I get what you are saying and, at an absolute level, you are right: having a turbine is indeed ideal if you want to fly 1000 NM regularly. The thing is, how often do you really want to do that?
My experience suggests that using an appropriate SEP for family trips is quite feasible: I fly a Cirrus SR22 and have an instrument rating. In the last 12 months, I have done 153 flights totalling 250 hours (75% is business and includes lots of 40 minute flights to Biggin Hill) and have only lost one flight to the weather.
Flying four up with reasonable luggage at 160 KTAS, my maximum range is about 600 NM although we tend to limit ourselves to about 3 hour flights which puts anything between the west coast of Ireland and mid Germany in range without a refuelling stop.
Flying two up, the range is well over 1000 NM, although I wouldn't really want to do that in one hit. The longest single leg I have flown in Europe was Prague to Cambridge against a big head wind: just over 4 hours.