I can cut a long drive in half or by two-thirds in what are considered slow (read: beginner-friendly) single-engine airplanes.
You take on an entirely different relationship with the weather.
Flying into expected congestion beats driving any time. I really enjoy flying to college football games, where just getting out of town afterward may take 90 minutes or more and then the rest of the trip home.
It creates flexibility and opens up options that road travel does not. I can get to the beach in two hours from where I live, making a day trip for fresh seafood doable. My son was in Auburn last year for the Tennessee game. Another couple flew down with me; we picked him up in Auburn and thence headed to Tuscaloosa. He got to watch four SEC teams play each other live in the same day.
Charities Pilots N Paws and Angel Flight transport rescue animals to their forever homes and vulnerable medical patients to and from treatments.
Fewer interactions with TSA creeps.
Maintaining my required medical certificate and protecting my investment in flight training creates a strong incentive to stay healthy. I’m in my best shape in decades. Of course it’s possible to find overweight pilots.
If you intend to fly to any sort of scheduled event, strongly consider adding an instrument rating, which will make you a much safer, more precise pilot and should increase your likelihood of surviving inadvertent flight into IMC.
It’s a rewarding intellectual and physical challenge. Phil Greenspun posits[0] that it keeps the mind active and young longer.
If you go to the local general aviation airport, you'll find lots of guys in their 60s and 70s who are tackling challenges that are way beyond your own capabilities. Certainly these guys are much sharper and in better mental and physical shape than the average person of their age. Flying requires mental acuity and real-time decision-making that seems to keep pilots young. A lot of older folks seem to be preoccupied with trivial matters, such as organizing their junk mail or minutia within their childrens' lives. Old pilots don't seem to be subject to these preoccupations and the topics of their conversations have more in common with young pilots than with other old people.
I co-own a Piper Cherokee Six/300 with two other pilots. It’s an easy way to dilute overhead costs of hangar, maintenance, insurance, and so on along with the time commitment of care and feeding.
Insurance may be cost-prohibitive for a brand new private pilot. For your first couple hundred hours, renting will likely be the better option. Airplanes rent by the Hobbs meter hour, or time the engine is running. “Wet” rentals, which means fuel included, is a common arrangement as well. A club I belong to reimburses us at the wholesale rate for fuel purchased at other airports. For overnight rentals, some places have a minimum number of hours per day that they charge because the airplane isn’t generating any revenue sitting on the ground.
You take on an entirely different relationship with the weather.
Flying into expected congestion beats driving any time. I really enjoy flying to college football games, where just getting out of town afterward may take 90 minutes or more and then the rest of the trip home.
It creates flexibility and opens up options that road travel does not. I can get to the beach in two hours from where I live, making a day trip for fresh seafood doable. My son was in Auburn last year for the Tennessee game. Another couple flew down with me; we picked him up in Auburn and thence headed to Tuscaloosa. He got to watch four SEC teams play each other live in the same day.
Charities Pilots N Paws and Angel Flight transport rescue animals to their forever homes and vulnerable medical patients to and from treatments.
Fewer interactions with TSA creeps.
Maintaining my required medical certificate and protecting my investment in flight training creates a strong incentive to stay healthy. I’m in my best shape in decades. Of course it’s possible to find overweight pilots.
If you intend to fly to any sort of scheduled event, strongly consider adding an instrument rating, which will make you a much safer, more precise pilot and should increase your likelihood of surviving inadvertent flight into IMC.
It’s a rewarding intellectual and physical challenge. Phil Greenspun posits[0] that it keeps the mind active and young longer.
If you go to the local general aviation airport, you'll find lots of guys in their 60s and 70s who are tackling challenges that are way beyond your own capabilities. Certainly these guys are much sharper and in better mental and physical shape than the average person of their age. Flying requires mental acuity and real-time decision-making that seems to keep pilots young. A lot of older folks seem to be preoccupied with trivial matters, such as organizing their junk mail or minutia within their childrens' lives. Old pilots don't seem to be subject to these preoccupations and the topics of their conversations have more in common with young pilots than with other old people.
[0]: http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/avi...