Originally Posted by
Vag277
To enlarge on Captain Midnight's points: I flew my aeroplane from Goulburn to Caloundra earlier this year. 5.5 hours (fun not fast), with an overnight due weather and one turn back due weather. Fuel cost approx $350, accommodation $100. If I had hired an aircraft, probably twice the cost.
I could have transported myself by jet over the same leg for approx $150 and less than 2 hours. Light aeroplanes are not the cost effective transport option of 40 years ago. Perhaps those of us with the aviation obsession need to look at our industry with the eyes of those who are not obsessed.
You only counted the ‘in air’ times. At what airport with an RPT jet service can you board 5 minutes after getting dropped by the taxi or parking your car?
Do the numbers for a jet from Goulburn to White Cliffs rather than Caloundra.
In any event, for some of us it’s not about the ‘efficiency’ of the mode of transport. It’s about flying for flying’s sake.
Flying for flying’s sake is now much harder and inconvenient than it used to be, and unnecessarily so. Flying for flying’s sake is now much more expensive than it used to be, and it’s a rip off. The causes have an even greater effect on those who try to make a living as a small business in aviation.
I’ll make a wild guess as to why your aircraft is parked at Goulburn rather than Canberra: Fees, charges and security arrangements? GA is treated as a low priority irritant by the airport owner. What little GA infrastructure that remains is inexorably being removed and the inconvenience levels increased. Next time you fly into Canberra in a GA aircraft, see if you find an air-side toilet. (Try finding one at e.g. Parafield or Ceduna for that matter.) GA pilots are treated as supplicants.
Ask all the flying training schools that used to be based in Canberra: Why did you leave? How much was the average cost simply to do 1 circuit in a Cessna 152?
There is no longer any GA maintenance organisation on the field at Canberra. And Canberra is the capital city of a country that feigns first-world aviation nation status.
There are country aerodromes whose facilities haven’t had a cent spent on them in 30 years.
Meanwhile the ‘safety’ regulator keeps on complicating rather than simplifying. It’s just the same cycle, over and over and over again, but with each lap the complexity of the rules just keeps piling up, the number of participants in ‘mainstream GA’ decreases, the salaries of the regulator’s staff increase and the ‘we are going to fix everything soon’ review is just a bigger insult our intelligence. (Dick’s on yet another lap of his futile ‘put pressure on the new Minister’ merry-go-round. Just goes to show that even old dogs who are millionaires can’t be taught new tricks.)
All of this is man made. It’s man made by the stultifying mediocrities that have presumed the title ‘governments’ over the last couple of decades. All the ‘simplified’ new Parts of the civil aviation legislation aren’t gold tablets discovered in the desert. They are man made. They are made by complicators, not simplifiers. Part 61 didn’t simplify and didn’t contribute thing one to safety. People are being paid six-figure salaries to create this complexity then review the mess they’ve made.
The same stultifying mediocrities have built an economy that is mainly a Ponzi scheme dependent on immigration-driven demand. The same mediocrities who’ve inflicted the highest energy prices and decreased the average citizens’ standard of living while creating a record number of millionaires (including private individuals to whom our public infrastructure was effectively gifted) and a record number of homeless.
This is what is driving the exodus away from the mainstream parties to the minor parties and independents. Heavens’ knows what they’ll do when they take charge, but it can’t be much worse than the alternatives.