Mooney_Driver wrote:
Michael wrote:
Europeans, by & large, have far more leisure time than Americans.
Do we really. Doesn’t seem like.
I remember moving back to Europe (Russia in this case) 10 years ago and being told by HR that I had 28 days of vacation. I was astonished. “Does anyone actually take all that vacation,” I asked? “Yes, of course,” it’s a legal requirement." Now I’m used to 28 days + holidays & can’t really imagine moving back to the US way of doing things. I actually think vacations are good for people and their productivity. But as someone who has worked both in the US and in Europe, I would say that on average Europeans DEFINITELY HAVE more leisure time than Americans. And I think that’s a good idea.
I’m personally happy to get a grand total of ~325 hours of time off every year, in my US job. Call it 40 days. We combine sick time and vacation, and get 10 additional paid holidays. I like it that way and have stayed with the same employer for a long time, partly for that reason. It’s allowed me time as well as money to travel widely when I’m not working. Others in the US see work as a central element in what they want to be doing every day, in the current phase of their life. Many of the those same Americans will move on and do something different in another phase of their life, before many Europeans would have the money to do so. Or maybe they will work until they’re old, take satisfaction in doing so, and pass substantial new wealth to their heirs. Either way it’ll be their choice, good idea or not.
I’m hoping to have maybe 15 years of flying my plane after US retirement, time will tell, while also living some portion of the year in Europe. I’ll have lots of time and enough money to play with my ‘mechanical pets’ then. After that who knows, there will be one more phase. It’s not a bad plan, at least it works for me. 
To return to the original question: it is very difficult for someone new to GA to understand how a license or airplane can realistically be used. People starting out often have extravagant ideas of utility (commuting, or long trips with the family, etc). Matching the plane to your skill level & then fitting the package into your life is a complex calculation. I know exactly how we will use our plane. It will be based in a foreign country & we will use it for long weekends and vacations to travel. In fact, the flying will begin with a commercial flight to the plane, often using bonus miles for the ticket. It works for us because we love to travel. Typically we’ll take off from a major airport and land at a short grass runway. We’re flexible. If the weather doesn’t cooperate, we rent a car. It is an instrument for traveling and having fun that fits in well with how we have entertained ourselves for years. This is how I rented in the past. The only difference is we’ll be flying to our own plane rather than a rental.
WhiskeyPapa wrote:
To return to the original question: it is very difficult for someone new to GA to understand how a license or airplane can realistically be used. People starting out often have extravagant ideas of utility (commuting, or long trips with the family, etc). Matching the plane to your skill level & then fitting the package into your life is a complex calculation.
It is not exactly helped by the attitude towards or lack of knowledge about possible private use scenarios by instructors and/or schools. I believe that I landed at more airports during my California trip than the number of airports an average instructor here lands before starting to instruct… The overly conservative weather policies during training do not help as well. I think the main reason is that they are not really interested in keeping a healthy private GA scene.
Peter wrote:
As I wrote in that thread, I don’t believe it, because for 300k € you could dismantle the plane, gold plate every part of it in 24ct gold, and reassemble it.
Quite right. If you have to take the engine out, ship is somewhere for repair and return it to the aircraft, the difference between having the aircraft at Helgoland will be (a) the additional shipping cost for shipping out there instead of the home base, (b) flying out and housing the engineer doing this at both ends of the job, and (c) the additional hangarage cost at Helgoland.
If that is more expensive than containering the aicraft and shipping it back, the owner should ship it. And I can’t really see that being 300k Euros. Or 100,000 Euros, either, which is what is left over after gold plating approximately 70,000 square inches at 2-3 $ per square inch.
One TB21 owner I was in contact with had a gear up landing in Turkey. The insurer ordered it be crated and shipped back (to Switzerland, I believe) on a truck. And a gear up on a TB21 is c. €60k.
Peter wrote:
…had a gear up landing in Turkey.
A pilot in East Germany whom I know cheaply bought a C303 that had suffered a gear collapse in the Czech Republic. He hired and aircraft mechanic and a low-floor truck and together they removed one of the wings, put everything on the truck and hauled it 200 or 300 Kilometers to their base in Germany. That took just a weekend and he paid no more than 5000 Euros for everything. Since then he has had it rebuilt to (ferry) flight condition and sold it on with a huge profit.
More stats have appeared in FTN, which I have not noticed before
Note the caveat about the number of licenses, not the number of pilots.
The trajectory of those curves (upward) is quite surprising. Is there a source for equivalent data for all of Europe/EASA?
