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Photo: Phillip Danze

I'm pretty much a trained rat when it comes to planning trips. Like most pilots, most of my routes are repeated over and over again. Flying from New York to Wichita, for example, is a trip I have made more times then I care to count. But it does seem like I have spent well over half my life bouncing along in the usually miserable flying weather over Pennsylvania.

My fuel stops along those familiar routes have also remained the same for decades. I land in Indianapolis for fuel while heading west to Wichita, and then at Columbus on the way back home. I picked those cities years ago because each is a little more than half way to the destination, and because I like full capability airports such as Indy and Port Columbus. I like having a control tower to read me the clearance and ATC radar that goes to the surface. And I have found that often the routing is better when you use the major airport instead of a satellite field. The traffic flow is designed to optimize the big airport operation, and I fit into that flow just fine.

Over the past months the wild variation in avgas prices from one airport to another have made me rethink my old fuel stop habits. The big airports have always charged at least a little more than the strictly GA fields, but we were talking a few cents a gallon. Lately the difference in fuel prices have been a dollar or more a gallon. I usually take on around 100 gallons in my Baron after flying for three hours and a little more, so the difference in price is important.

A few weeks ago I was planning a flight from Orlando to Oshkosh and Nashville was right about in the middle. I have always found Nashville to be a great fuel stop with its three parallel runways and short taxi from the center runway to the FBOs. But when I looked at fuel prices on Fltplan.com — one of the best sources for all flight planning available, and it's free — I saw avgas prices reported by the FBOs of more than $7 at Nashville. Fltplan.com also shows information from nearby airports and Shelbyville, Tennessee, about 36 miles south of the big airport in Nashville had avgas for $4.16 a gallon. Shelbyville turned out to be an excellent GA airport with a long runway and excellent service. And I saved nearly $300.

As I planned this week's trip to Wichita I checked Fltplan.com and saw the avgas prices at $6.72 and $5.70 at the two FBOs on the big Indy airport, but just $4.89 at Mount Comfort on the east side of town. Mount Comfort was built with FAA funds more than 30 years ago specifically as a demonstration of the GA reliever airport concept meant to direct traffic away from the airline airport. It doesn't have a control tower, but does have two runways and an ILS. To save nearly a buck a gallon, Mount Comfort is my choice.

There are many factors such as taxes and high rents that drive up fuel costs on big airports compared to the smaller GA fields and maybe the percentage difference between the cost of the big and small operations is about the same as it used to be. But with the low-cost average of avgas above $4, a 25 percent difference in cost is now huge. When fuel was around $2 or less, as it was for much of the last 30 years, the difference in price got lost in the noise of overall airplane operating costs.

I remember when the FBO at Indianapolis was owned by the flamboyant air racer Roscoe Turner. Then there was excellent service from the same facility under Combs-Gates. Signature owns the operation now and service is still terrific. But the difference in fuel price is just too much to justify. I hope some sequence of events can return fuel costs close to what we thought of as normal, but for now I'll be checking Fltplan.com before every trip and breaking many of my old habits.