this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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No matter how expensive a home sim you make, it won't ever get be even a quarter of what an actual entry amateur plane costs to buy and maintain. It's not even the plane itself either, it's all the recurring costs like storage, maintenance, spare parts, fuel, certification fees, taxes, etc. The only cheap flight option for a recreational pilot is bushcraft light planes. And they will still cost more than the sim setup, while you'll only be able to fly it on certain places, during certain weather, at certain times of the year. The rest of the time you'll still have to pay all the storage and maintenance fees. Planes are incredibly expensive.
Yeah, you’ll be able to actually use it when life allows you, vs restructuring your whole life around being able to fly.
Now we just need one for where millionaires think their work is saving the world. Apparently the city building sims aren’t sufficient.
Well they keep triggering tornadoes and alien attacks and shit.
Yes and no. I bought a property with a double wide and a 5000 square foot hangar on it located on a private strip. The rent from the double wide and the other hangar spots I rent pays the mortgage and all the expenses related to the property. I own a j3 cub that I have about 30k into that I fly daily in Florida and maintain it myself for practically nothing. Affordable aviation is possible but you have to be very smart about how you go about doing it, and a good bit of luck is involved to get the right deals by being in the right place at the right time.
Oh sure, just go buy a big enough property to have a hanger and a private landing strip on it. Cheap and easy!
If you're ok with living in the middle of nowhere, then it's entirely doable. Some folks just have different priorities.
For instance, here is a property in Yucca Valley, CA that has a hanger in the backyard, where you can head out right on the runway from your yard. Just under $300k. There's an entire street of houses that are adjacent to the runway of a small municipal airstrip, I think they call them fly in/fly out communities. They're often well off the beaten path, but you don't have to pay for storage when you have a hanger out back.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/57544-Sunnyslope-Dr-Yucca-Valley-CA-92284/17496243_zpid/
I'm not saying that those deals are bad, but we are still talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, where a sim setups is 30k or 40k at most.
Dude I have a mortgage. I put 25k down on the property. I rent out the house and 3 spots in the hangar. I get enough income from rent on the property to pay the mortgage and have profit on top every month. I’m not a rich by any means. But I live comfortably enough.
I mean, I hope you get rich mate! Yeah I understand your point, and I am also definitely happy that affordable aviation is not a multimillionaire only dream. Though still those simulations are maybe 5 percent of the costs we are talking, yet :(
Yea I’m in FL in a small town. If you want to live in a big city aircraft ownership is on a whole different level of cost.
You have to have the kind of life and professional occupation which is compatible with living in such a place.
Not many people have or are willing to change their lives in order to be able to fly regularly on a real plane like that. It's like people who chose to live on a boat and sail around the World (doable, if you adjust your whole life to it and have the skill to work in the kind of occupation compatible with it).
Meanwhile a setup like the one on the picture is a lot easier to work into one's life, even living in appartment in the middle of a city and with a 9-to-5 regular Joe job.
Never said it was easy, but I have less than 60k of my cash into everything, including a property that generates me money back. You gotta work for what you want. It’s not like I just inherited the capital to do this. I worked for it. And now I have something that will not only pay for itself but pay me as well. But go ahead and just try to hold yourself down with that thought process if you want.
Yes, but I bet that if you break down the accounting it would still be several times the cost of the setup on the photo. Home sims typically don't carry an additional mortgage payment or a lifestyle commitment.
You would be surprised how much that setup would cost. Could easily be 30k in equipment there.
That setup is not 30k, I know because I'm a sim hobbyist. Maybe if it had a surround canopy or a motion chair, maybe, and it's just maybe, it will start approaching 10k. Most people consider motion to be secondary and unnecessary for commercial flight simulation, and people are increasingly preferring VR over modular panels. Sim still doesn't require uprooting your life to live in the middle of nowhere, switching careers, and going into debt to buy property and risk financial ruin with a fickle investment. It's ok, some people are fine flying sim because they never would get to fly an Airbus IRL and wouldn't want a job as a airline pilot to get to do it, they just want to play pretend, and that's fine.
That's not even counting the not small chunk of people who are actually commercial pilots who also build sim rigs in their homes.
None of the stuff applies to owning an aircraft in my case either. I’m still where I grew up. I never switched careers, and how is it a fickle investment where I’m literally cash positive on the whole thing, building equity in something that will be worth a ton in the future… you think investments are risk free or something?
Ok so buy a house next to a strip with your own hangar and become an airplane mechanic. How come I never thought of this?
If you’re truly passionate about flying and owning aircraft then you do what you have to do to make it happen, that’s what I did anyways. Exactly that. And I have less than 60k of investment in everything. The property generates profit now.
Fair enough, and I respect the commitment and that you share how you made it work. Without going 'all-in', having our own plane is a dream that'll never go through...
(But I can imagine that even with the same commitment a lot of people wouldn't have the opportunity to copy it - money is one thing but available property is another)
Agreed, a bit of luck is absolutely necessary.
59% of Americans are one paycheque away from homelessness.
Yea, I’m one of them lol. I run my own business and if I shutdown for a month I’d be screwed.
Plus I'm afraid of heights.
I have some fear of heights and for some reason it doesn't get triggered when flying on a plane, even on a prop-plane a km or two above the ground.
High up in tall buildings or mountain or coastal cliffs, sure, planes, not at all.
It's not exactly rational.
If you're not actually afraid of flying when on a commercial flight, I bet you won't either when at the commands of a poky prop-plane.
There's heights and there heights. The common fear is of heights that are large enough for a fall to cause serious injury, and not too large to be out of range for biological fall protection
I used to be afraid of heights, but trained myself out of it as an adult. I had trouble abseiling, walking on elevated walkways, standing near windows in tall buildings
Three things I never had a height problem with:
I looked into getting a pilots license and a plane once thinking maybe it would be more fun than flying commercial.
The license to fly just a dinky Cessna would be expensive af and I would only be able to afford a Cessna from 1982 or some shit anyway AND they only have a range of like 300 miles or some shit.
To actually go anywhere beyond my state I'd need a private jet license which is even more expensive takes a while and WAY outside of affordability.
Ah well guess I'm stuck driving or flying commercial
I fucking love the dedication people put into their sin rigs. Their joy makes me so happy, even more so when it's related to their real work. This guy is a trucker and recreated his entire cabin for his American Trucker sim. He's my fucking hero: https://youtube.com/shorts/EmpAJR5lNuQ?si=Z324Z-M_pGG_9Bp-
Let me guess, it comes in 50 shades of grey
Wet rental?
Wet lease? Yeah, clubs and leasing are an accessible option but depends on what you want to do. Flying a tiny 182 Cessna, sure will be as much as a nice Sim setup. For one flight, at $200 an hour, roughly 25 hours of flight or thereabouts and you're already over the price of the simulator.
Fly commercial jets, like the one this picture is simulating? No way. A small Citation jet starts at $50k a month. That's probably already 5 times the cost of equipment in that photo. And you can fly the big birds and do crazy stuff with them in the sim.
Indeed.
Back when I was making extra good money I got some flying lessons and started dreaming about it and eventually figured out the costs (bad enough the upfront ones, way worse the running costs) for a shitty-shit plane that wasn't even exciting to fly.
Also the physical setup in the picture looks like it's emulating large commercial passenger planes (don't really know enough to guess which, though) and those planes cost millions of dollars.