The price of gas, the price of gas. The shaky stock market and the hammered housing industry. These are the circling vultures of today. Suddenly, after years and years of moving up, making more, having more, feeling wealthier, I'm sensing the roller coaster slipping out from under me. On the internet, my trolling activity for new airplanes has switched from light jets to piston twins. Jet-A has just gotten out of hand.
I'm not sure I ever noticed previous "recessions." Most were minor and occurred while I was otherwise occupied. If they had any direct effect on me or my purchasing power, I was too excited by other developments in my life to take much notice. I'm noticing now.
Recently invited to the medical school at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire, I looked at flying our Cheyenne from Tampa to Lebanon versus taking Southwest to Manchester and renting a car. Fuel alone for our airplane was calculated by flight planning on duats and fuel prices on airnav.com. The trip up could be made nonstop; the return required a stop, for which I chose the cheapest fuel I could find (self-fueling) at an airport with sufficient runway length. Filling up at Lebanon was expensive, but a stop on the way up made no sense. By the time we descended, re-fueled at a cheap place and climbed back up, the fuel costs were within a few dollars of each other. Besides, the whole idea is to fly nonstop from Florida to New Hampshire, isn't it?
The trip up would take just under 4.4 hours, the return about an hour longer. The trip on the airline/rental car plan was seven hours up, six back. The price difference? For fuel alone, the Cheyenne was $3,185. The airline was $370 round trip; the rental car was $100. Forget about the airplane's fixed costs, engine reserves, etc.
It is finally sinking in. At 5 a.m. I am rousted out of bed so as to make the 6:30 flight to Manchester via Baltimore. My wife and I just barely make it; security is slow and it is "spring break." The airline is packed. I note to a TSA person that the line is especially long and ask if the increased traffic volume was anticipated. "It was," she said, "but you can't control call ins." I guess the TSA people were on spring break, too. Cathy and I split up, each claiming a middle seat.
At Baltimore we find two seats together for the 58 minute ride to Manchester, then chat with the predictably friendly Southwest crew. The captain and the FO have been talking about fuel prices, too, she tells me. They worry that today's airlines and today's fares are not in line with costs. The model does not seem sustainable with oil prices significantly over $100 a barrel.
In the course of less than one year, I've gone from daydreaming about light jets, TBMs and that Epic homebuilt to thinking about P Barons and Cessna 421s or even back to whence I came: the Cessna 340. Now, I recognize that this type of readjustment is a privilege. Many pilots are thinking of getting out of airplane ownership altogether, or their choices are far less grand than those I'm facing. There are, I suppose, others who are downgrading their jets, too. Point is, of course, that the price of fuel has had an effect on all of us. Even my wife has recently bought a Prius. She's getting 47-52 miles per gallon and I have stopped routinely filling her tank each Sunday. There is no reason to.
Our rolling stock gets 50 miles per gallon for her car, 22.6 for my car and 3 for the Cheyenne. The fuel price for the New Hampshire trip has gone up by $1,600 dollars over the past two years. Since my salary hasn't doubled to keep pace, I'm in the same position as the airlines: an unsustainable financial model. Sooner or later something has got to give.
What to do? My wife brings up co-ownership frequently. This makes good business sense. We fly less than 200 hours per year, leaving plenty of time for a partner to fly our airplane. It would cut the maintenance, insurance and hangar fees in half. How can I explain that the airplane wouldn't be "mine" in a way that doesn't make me sound like a covetous, controlling jerk? But it wouldn't be mine, it would be ours. All decisions would have to be shared. And if I wanted to go to the airport to wash or polish the airplane, it might not be there. "He" would be somewhere with it.
I joked recently with Bill Turley, our maintenance guru, that flying to Bartow (39 nm) will be a big trip for me soon. Forget New Hampshire, the West Coast and even New Orleans (where I remember jet-A at $1.85 a gallon), just a local flight will be all I get. If I'm just flying around Florida, a turboprop is way too much airplane. I told him my wife has said we can go to the airplane in the evening after work and have a martini, just sitting in it. I told him that the suggestion, though a generous one, somehow makes me wistful, maybe even just a little testy, because it reminds me that I am not flying. What am I supposed to do? Sit there and make airplane noises?
