Thanks!
Got my PP ticket back in '85... The material for 107 has a lot of similarities, and it's been a big help that I'm already familiar with charts and aviation weather.
Still, I've forgotten a lot. I renewed my single engine, VFR cert once, then stopped flying soon thereafter as it was just too expensive (back then!) to do for fun as a newly minted, single, 20-something engineer.
$50/hr wet-tach for a 152, thereabouts. I wonder what it costs today? I'd probably faint
I started flying lessons many years ago and with about 20-25 hour I had to go overseas for an IT contracting job for a year and when I came back, life just got in the way and I didn't continue. I was doing contracts in different parts of the country.
But I have always had the passion for flying. I have owned every version of Flight Simulator since Bruce Artwick and his company Sublogic first originally started it and then taken over by Microsoft.
I have Flight Simulator 2020 and do fly it regularly. It fills that void of not becoming a pilot and it really does a great job with it's great graphics. Microsoft is releasing a new 2024 version this year.
The money spent on a good PC to run it is much cheaper and safer than flying in a real plane. I agree that flying a plane is a very expensive hobby to have, unless you go on, get you license and fly with the big airliners.
I'm sure it's way more that $50/hr wet by now. I think it could be more in the $100-150/hr these days with inflation.
I took my test at a flight school and they had tons of student pilots there. Here in Vero Beach Florida, they have three big flight schools. It is also home to Piper where they build their aircrafts. During COVID, this place was kind of of like a ghost town, no pilots anywhere. Now thing are picking up and FlightSafety International, which was one of the big three sold to SkyBorne, I think a British company, but not as popular as FlightSafety was.
Here you go to Starbucks, or just about anywhere and you run into pilots. I did my test at Paris Air Inc, which is one of the big ones and it seems that their business is now better them the other two big one. FlightSafety use to do real good here and surprised they sold, but they were all bleeding money due to COVID. There are also a couple of of smaller flight schools.
Charts were the easiest for me. I have a subscription to Navigraph that I use with Flight Simulator. It has all the charts, sectionals and approach plates needed to fly anywhere on the simulator. I've been using charts for decades.
BTW the IT work that I did was with software used the the Airlines, Banking and Hotels industries. Companies that required large online transaction volumes, so I spent a lot of my career working in the airline industry. There again, my fascination with flying,
