An an aside, if you're an executive, flying private with your team (all as passengers) makes it easy to continue to work on the flight and prepare for the upcoming meeting. If you're busy piloting the plane, it becomes much harder if not impossible to be a part of that.
I routinely fly through clouds but don't fuck with ice :)
It took my wife and I about three months to do our instrument ratings where that was pretty much our solid focus. It felt like a bit of a slog at the end, but pretty rewarding.
Apparently, his father wooed his mother by taking her on dates to the "mainland."
1. You, an exec, are going to want to see an ROI on the substantial time and money commitment you made in getting instrument rated. So you're going to want to use that aircraft as much as possible. Back when you flew commercial, you'd sit in the back of a 737 debriefing yourself after a brutal meeting with a gin and tonic and some angry emails to your minions. Now you've gone straight from having your ear burned off by a furious client to negotiating complex clearances in the clouds.
2. Get-there-itis kills. And now you have a plane, so, sure you can make that widget sales meeting in Spokane and be back in time for your kid's game... But the weather is closing in. You sold your spouse on the idea of a private aircraft just for situations like this, so you could be present for family and grow the business. Oh, but the client is on the fence, so maybe you need to stick around for a bit and admire their factory. Hey, no takeoff time right? Now it really is time to go. Ceilings are low, there's ice, a storm en-route, it's all a bit marginal. But you don't want to miss junior's first pitch so off you go into the murk and a couple hours later some volunteer firefighters from a town you've never heard of are shoveling what's left of you into black sacks while trying not to vomit.
All of which is to say, it's a brilliant idea as long as your travel area enjoys VFR conditions most of the time. Now your instrument rating is a buttress for your safety, instead of an excuse to extend your limits.
In my opinion, this is one of the more important things to member. In my life, it explains why I ran out of gas tying to get to a meeting and why I didn't backup $busy_executive Outlook PST file before doing a "repair".
The author goes through a bunch of case studies of people in survival situations, some who made it, others who didn't. The ones who didn't generally did something that seems pretty stupid at first glance. He gets into some neuroscience and you realize how easy it would be to make the same mistake.
To my mind the pilot is weighing a few possible future outcomes:
- satisfying some obligation by completing the journey, getting pats on the back or avoiding further trouble.
- disappointing or angering stakeholders (clients, wives and sisters-in-law, children) by cancelling a journey due to prudence, and then, potentially, further feeling that one will be perceived as inadequately skilled at something which is a prominent part of one's self-identity.
- taking off anyway and maybe having to make an emergency landing en route, thus demonstrating eagerness to complete the journey and a heroic, skillful handling of a dangerous situation.
- dying in a fiery crash.
Even outcome three ends up being positive for the pilot. They get all the social credit for having attempted the journey, plus an unimpeachable excuse for failing to complete it. Dying in a crash is just a hard thing to imagine, so maybe features far less in the flight decision emotional risk balancing than it should.
One of the vanishingly few safety things which the scuba diving community does perhaps better than aviation is the idea that "any diver may thumb [abort] a dive for any reason at any time," and that is fully expected to include just 'feeling bad.' It is an integral part of the buddy system which doesn't have an analog in aviation, but maybe there could be a mental preflight checklist which could be used to identify situations where GtI is a factor and thus give the pilot a basis for staying on the ground when their gut is saying, "don't take off!"
https://www.salon.com/1999/07/20/reckless_2/
Visual flight rules aviation is far more prone to weather delays than any other mode of travel. You can walk in a rainstorm or drive in a blizzard if you really want to, but it's straight up illegal to fly in conditions below certain visibility thresholds.
If the company I worked for had an exec/part time pilot mandating I flew with them they'd be my ex-employer in an eyeblink.
The mandatory annual grounds your plane for at least a few weeks, and that's the best case scenario where your plane does not have significant ADs or issues. Aircraft maintenance shops are very busy (have been for a couple years due to mandatory ADS-B upgrades and are still working through those backlogs) and therefore expensive.
Finding a good and honest aircraft mechanic is also a dilemma, and you're kinda geographically bound in your search. Hasn't happened to me (I hope), but if you flip through the pages of "Plane and Pilot" or "Flying", it's full with the stories of "mechanic suggested a $20,000 engine overhaul, I spent the next two weeks researching the issue on my own, called multiple friends of mine and it turned out I just needed to replace a $300 part".
Airplane ownership favors those mechanically inclined. There are like hundreds of random things that could seem merely suspicious during the pre-flight inspection, but turn out to be a major problem when dug deeper. People who have done flying professionally (airline pilots, airforce) and mechanics seem to have an edge on this.
> "mechanic suggested a $20,000 engine overhaul, I spent the next two weeks researching the issue on my own, called multiple friends of mine and it turned out I just needed to replace a $300 part"
Do you think the equivalent in the web industry is a someone stating an entire app needs an overhaul, "because PHP" when maybe it is a simple bug fix?
Us engineer minded folks are quick to want to re-engineer things.
The $300 part fixes your problem today, the rebuilt engine fixes the reliability problem you might still have after the $300 quick-fix.
Please identify which part of the post was a personal attack so I can fix it to your satisfaction
How to fix it: don't mix personal language with sharp criticism, and don't use a prosecutorial style. We want curious conversation here, not cross examination. The guidelines cover all this and more: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It sounds like you know a lot in this field. The very best thing to do in that case is not to go on about others' ignorance (demonstrated or assumed)—it's rather to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn.
I can't edit that comment anymore though.
There are no 20k overhauls for jets.
Even with car driving, haste to reach a destination is a bad advisor and often leads to accidents. Planning with ample time buffers is also increasing safety there.
A lot of famous people have been killed in small-plane crashes. If we could go back in time and keep musicians from flying on private planes, just imagine how different music might be now: Buddy Holly, Randy Rhodes, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Lynyrd Skynyrd (band members), Rickey Nelson, Ritchie Valens, just to name a few.
Depending on the airport and your timing, if you have TSA Precheck + Clear, no checked bag and a scheduled car service, you can get dropped off, through security and onto a United/Delta with basically no waiting.
Besides, if you can afford a plane for trips like this the cost of hiring a pilot to fly your plane is in the noise and well worth is just so you can get something done.
That’s often not true. They do ask and you have to provide records but it doesn’t necessarily impact rates. Pilots are generally wealthier, better educated and need to undergo regular medical exams to keep their certificate. All things that statistically make one healthier. There are many aspects that make a pilot a more attractive life insurance candidate from a risk standpoint, not less.
I can get a nice cheap policy as a pilot with the small airplane exclusion though, but since piloting the small aircraft is one of the more dangerous things I do, seems like not a good idea to exclude it.
My policy is not written in such a way.
* Pilots have lower risk of death than the general population (because of health requirements and general wealthiness)
* A person who decides to become a pilot has a higher risk of death than if they didn't (because a lot of private pilots crash)
How becoming a pilot affects life insurance is based on the second, not the first.
What are the odds of two instrument rated BASE jumpers on HN?
Even billionaires play with OPM, and key man insurance is a thing.
Definitely airport pairs where this could be a huge time savings though.
There is no way in hell that aviation has “saved me time” overall. It does save me time on the day of a trip when everything goes perfectly, but there are many winter days in New England that are flyable by twin jets that are not flyable even in de-iced piston singles. You just don’t have the power surplus or airspeed to plan to climb through a moderate layer of icing.
If you lived on an island and commutes to the mainland near a satellite airport is one scenario where you could save time overall. Otherwise, it’s a time-consuming (and very fun) pastime.
Edit: If you buy one of the piston versions second hand. I just checked Wikipedia and it seems like Piper realised what I said above at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_PA-46 (and charge accordingly).
The kind of plane Steve Wozniak had his famous crash with in 1981?
Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC
From accounts, it sounds like he stalled the plane on climbout. He claims his girlfriend leaned on the controls, which doesn't make a lot of sense, because leaning on the yoke would push the nose down, preventing a stall. Who knows what actually happened.
But yes, a novice pilot with a fast, sophisticated plane is asking for trouble.