MedEwok wrote:
you will take about 2 hours to fly those 250 nm and by that time your passengers will probably want a pit stop anyways.
Agree, Very few – if any – pax want to fly legs longer than about 2:00 to 2:30 hours.
I think that does not hold true for a significant part of the GA community. If it was true, nobody would be flying GA between say Germany and W France, N Germany to Croatia, UK to “most interesting places”, etc. But many have been doing that. So they either have a means to pee 
or do a stop halfway. And a means of having a pee is actually very easy; various past threads on that topic
I am sure fewer people are doing longer trips today than say 10-20 years ago, but it is unlikely that suddenly everybody has decided they need to do pee stops
For sure most GA flyers will not do any flight longer than their pee endurance, but these people were not in the population under discussion to start with.
I have three kids and a wife and now a TB10 that could take all of us touring. My wife is not keen on GA but hops on because I want us to do it together. She would be ok with touring if we could plan something around weekends. But that rarely happens because of weather combined with personal minima. So if I had a IR ticket, I could imagine many more trips.
Not meaningfully limited on leg duration with passengers in the C172 at 4h30 until empty tanks as I don’t plan more than 2h30 doors closed to doors open. I might do 3h with my partner, understanding it might be pushing 4 with a diversion (which hasn’t happened with her yet).
110KTAS is more of a factor for me in combination with this.
UdoR wrote:
I experience the great luck that my wife supports my flying and she says where we’ve got to go. With the kids, of course. And she has some good ideas! So all is actually family time when I’m flying.
That is like winning the aviation lottery! Doesn’t come much better than that.
UdoR wrote:
I love her :-)
I bet!
The problem for many of us is that we too love our spouses and because of that eventually drop out when it’s the choice of her or the plane.
Ibra wrote:
I know many friends who packed up flying (or doing anything really) after getting the kids…the majority can’t even organise Sunday afternoon sortie with kids to see aircraft in hangar or get fresh air in an airfield, let alone fly with them !They have to stay at home until babies or kids are 18 years old…they don’t even change nappies, cook, study or clean house: they are simply sucked into 20 years old black hole where you do nothing meaningful with their life: not even walking, let alone flying
That appears to be the normal case. Hence we got pilots who fly from 18-30 and then past 50 or 60 again. And now, where people wait until they are 40 or 50 to get kids as they wish to “enjoy” life before that, the whole age group shifts backwards.
MedEwok wrote:
I’m very proud on having finally managed to drag my wife and the kids to the hangar to see the aircraft up close. Son (6) got very interested, wife was much more interested than I feared and only daughter (5) was terribly afraid of even sitting down in the parked aircraft inside the hangar, apparently afraid we would take off suddenly.
It’s a start. Your daughter may well turn around once she reaches 6 or 7. Show her some vids of people flying and the fun stuff they get to do at the other end.
Peter wrote:
To see Europe from the air, one needs more range than that.
Range and speed both. Even though 500 NM is not that bad, it is more than enough to do most stuff and gives people a chance to do a walk and pee break in between.
I’d say planes for travelling should start at 130 kts or upwards. 90 kt planes like the Warrior are really better for other stuff. But there are plenty even non complex planes which have both the range and the speed, such as the Grumman Tiger, C182 and similar.
Airborne_Again wrote:
At my club, we make sure that any new FI actually understands what club flying is about and not expect students wear a uniform and follow airline-style SOPs.
What is wrong about following SOP’s? They have to be scaled down to fit the airplane of course, but all of flying does have some SOP’s which greatly help to transit from simple trial and error to a comparatively stressfree operation.
I often wonder how people fly their planes who don’t know the first thing about them. No idea about performance, no idea about their avionics, no idea about their procedures, having to read every point of the checklist and searching for the right switches, I’d not have fun doing that.
SOP’s does not mean the stop of fun, imho it is the start of very necessary proficiency. It also greatly helps if within a club everyone follows the same kind of SOPs so if you ever get to fly together, people know what the other is doing.
Is the GA aircraft owner profile changing?
Yes, it is and I noticed that during this summer on many occasions. I was enjoying my summer vacation by wings and almost every pilot I met doing similar talked of it as ‘an event’. For me it was just using the aircraft in lieu of a car, so felt quite ‘normal’.
So, thesis – as long as GA is either Sunday round coffee table or raised to the heights of galactic event with nothing in between, we never get some kind or normality in using GA in Europe. I feel sad.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
What is wrong about following SOP’s?
Nothing, if they are the right SOPs. That’s why I wrote “airline-style SOPs”.
90 kt planes like the Warrior are really better for other stuff.
Please, yes as flown by flying clubs at 2200 RPM in some delusion that this extends engine life. When flown by the book a well rigged Warrior is good for 120 KTAS.
RobertL18C wrote:
Please, yes as flown by flying clubs at 2200 RPM in some delusion that this extends engine life. When flown by the book a well rigged Warrior is good for 120 KTAS.
I thought they did it principally to save fuel, given they are charging their customers wet by the hour. Mind you, a bit of leaning would help but schools seem allergic to that.
They tend to put climb props on too, presumably to help get up there quickly for the stalling exercises and to help them get off quickly after landing long on a touch and go. At Waltham where I learned they taught you to fly 2300rpm in the cruise and full rich, which depending on the airframe yielded about 90-95 KIAS at low level (PA28-161) – so the props must have been pretty finely-pitched. Above 3,000ft they suggested tweaking the red lever back ‘a tiny bit’ but no more.
Unless flown by the more ‘going places’ part of the GA community I tend to feel that such aircraft spend most of their time at relatively low level, so low that KTAS (which depends on altitude and conditions) is a less useful performance comparison that KIAS.
