My Private Olympus
Karlgaard, Rich
My Private Olympus BY RICH KARLGAARD The desire to fly a small airplane, if it appears in one at all, normally does so in youth. But not for me. Quite suddenly at age 45 I was gripped by the idea...
...In fact, two airplanes under instrument control have never collided in the U.S., a remarkable record.The debate in 2001 is, can onboard technology do as good a job...
...The stupidest thing one can do, which I immediately did, is go out and buy an airplane before one knows how to fly it...
...Oh, yes, and I finally got my private pilot's certificate...
...Before the Greens or the FAA decide to take this one away, I intend to visit every state in the Union, in a small airplane...
...Accuracy is within a few feet...
...A trifle...
...Flying by the gauges is counterintuitive...
...What's a third of a million dollars...
...For these modest sums I get to fly 150 hours a year...
...it takes a minimum of 40 hours of in-flight training to become a private pilot...
...Quite a number smell vaguely of puke...
...That is, if every plane has GPS, onboard maps, radio and radar, why shouldn't pilots take responsibility for seeing and avoiding each other, thereby winning back some freedom and saving the taxpayer some money...
...Thanks again, trial lawyers...
...I did, even though I bounced my short-field landing and momentarily forgot how to do radio tracking...
...This is the rating John F. Kennedy, Jr...
...But such a tradeoff, if it could be worked out, would be worth it...
...My kids get to go to private schools, and my wife once again talks to me without weepy outbursts...
...The seats are torn, the plastic is peeling...
...Flying is a huge kick and a privilege, too...
...Private aviation is nearly impossible in Europe, with its high population densities, silly noise restrictions and Avgas prices that can reach $6 a gallon...
...It's a perfect example of what the Web does best...
...Life was bountiful...
...My wife started to weep, too, saying that my new sport had crowded out her dreams of a kitchen remodel and were keeping the kids in public school...
...Three days after getting my certificate, I took up my first willing passenger (or victim) in my time-shared Cessna 172SP.Jeff, an old college roommate, was in town for our Stanford 25 reunion...
...With a private certificate one can fly anywhere in the U.S...
...Costs would fall, safety would improve and more people could afford to fly...
...All my instincts screamed at me: pull the yoke and raise the nose...
...A little history on the economics of flying: In 1978, the number of small aircraft built by Cessna, Mooney, Piper, Beechcraft, and others peaked at over 18,000...
...What a shame that flying costs so much and is regulated so dumbly...
...Dirtbags...
...they have to knuckle down and masterVOR, including (I kid you not) Morse Code and spastic needles...
...The main point is that until this summer, still short of obtaining my certificate, I did not fly...
...We were flying perfectly straight and level...
...Yes, and it clearly was Mooney's fault whenever a 20-hour student pilot buzzed his girlfriend's house at 200 feet, stalled and spun it in...
...To start there is ultimate freedom—roaming the skies...
...In fact, tracking one's course by VHF Omidirectional Radio is a sore subject with many new pilots, and it should be.VOR was state-of-the-art for a generation, until the much superior Global Positioning Satellite system became cheap and available in the 1990s...
...This is frighteningly easy to do...
...So, what does American aviation's governing body think about GPS...
...But now, thanks to the Internet, a middle way has been born: fractional ownership or leasing...
...It's the same old depressing story: regulations, etched into law when they made sense, then hanging around long after their useful life...
...is guessed to be about 300,000...
...We floated on full flaps down into Reid Hillview and, to make it a perfect day, flared to a feather-smooth landing A pure greaser, pilots call it...
...These include making 45-degree bank angle turns for a full circle to the right, and then one to the left, without gaining or losing 100 feet or the examiner's lunch...
...Worth it...
...On top of this is the sublime delight of drinking Avgas by the quarter ton and burping out cubic miles of noise...
...Before Spectator readers tell me how rock stupid it was to buy a 202-mph retractable-gear, complex "doctor killer" as a training aircraft, let me tell you that it was March 2000 when Rich Karlgaard is Publisher of Forbes...
...Instrument flying has some freedom issues: it puts you under the constant orders of air traffic control...
...That's how I did it, hunched over my Sony Vaio laptop studying aerodynamics and density altitudes aboard commercial jets, traveling from my home in California to Forbes headquarters in New York...
...In recessionary 2001, the number could slide back to 2,000.The entire fleet of piston planes in the U.S...
...Global positioning has knockedVOR back to the Stone Age...
...All said, I bought the equivalent of a Lexus 450, as opposed to the equivalent of a Maui condo...
...Litigation exploded in the 1980s, and embedded itself into the price of every new airplane...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 87...
...outside of restricted military areas), cruise at any altitude below 18,000 feet, and land at any airport, except (post September 11) those within a 30-mile radius of Boston, New York and Washington DC...
...Last year the number of new planes crawled back to 2,500...
...In 1968, a new Beechcraft A36 cost $38,700...
...And I learned that I was very unhappy deprived of my aerial Prozac...
...Out of San Jose Reid-Hillview airport we climbed south, then leveled out over Monterey...
...And student pilots are required to play along with this criminally dangerous game...
...The national average is 70 hours...
...Nothing annoys lefty Greens more...
...I picked him up at dawn, so we could squeeze in our flying before the football game and festivities later that day...
...Ditto for the lucky pilot who was getting himself initiated into the "mile-high club," forgot to switch fuel tanks and ran out of gas...
...Dial in your destination's three-letter airport code (it already knows where you are) and pop!—there's an electronic map, a direct course, the heading to your destination, current ground speed in knots, and estimated time of arrival...
...I was going to be rich—didn't it say so in the IPO prospectus...
...The actual checkride consists of 90 minutes of oral quizzing and another 90 minutes of flight maneuvers that must be performed within the FAA's prescribed standards...
...This is pleasing to both halves of the soul, the secular-libertarian and the transcendent...
...for me, older and admittedly chicken, it took over 100 hours...
...It is getting so good it nearly can land a plane...
...This does not count classroom training for the written exam, which one can easily avoid (the training, not the exam) with a $300 CD-ROM course...
...Beginning a descent from 5,500 feet into Martha's Vineyard in his new Piper Saratoga HP, he lost the horizon in the evening gloaming...
...Flying a small airplane for giggles is feasible really only in the U.S., Canada and Australia...
...Yahoo was worth $100 billion, more than GM, Ford and Daimler-Chrysler combined...
...Liberty to do as you like is sacrificed for the comfort of knowing that one is being watched, and steered clear of any obstacles or other planes...
...I shouldn't be ungrateful...
...With crashes and rust, stocks are actually delpeting...
...In the U.S...
...Or else manfully rent old junk...
...But this is all side stuff...
...The Bonanza went bye bye in February this year...
...So for the last ten years, one's flying options have come down to this: buy a new plane and dispatch your wife to laundry jobs and your kids to public schools in ripped blue jeans...
...So that's why I fly...
...The largest private pilot lobby in the U.S., the Aircraft Owners and Pilot's Association, is perversely determined to preserve the status quo...
...During a period when the CPI has increased four-fold, the price of a new plane has gone up 18-fold...
...One would like to say such a motivation was mostly ideological, and it was...
...I made the decision...
...We continued up the coast, circling the Santa Cruz amusement park and its 1920s era mountainous wooden roller-coaster...
...A company I had founded, Garage.com, had just filed for its IPO...
...It fears losing free use of ATC, and getting no regulatory, tax or litigation relief in return...
...In 2001 it costs $645,000...
...By 1994, the number had fallen to about 900...
...I certainly felt it...
...My A36, a 1994 model, had every goodie a pilot could want—leather yoke, air-conditioning, six cylinders, six seats...
...But most blame trial lawyers...
...Then I shoved the throttle home and we climbed over the mountains, enjoying glass air and fifty-mile views...
...Level at 2,500 on a clear day you can watch pass under your cowling the most God-blessed landscape that ever was or will be...
...The general aviation fleet is old, because so few planes were built over the last twenty years...
...did not have...
...The gauges told another story...
...To the FAA, modern marvels of navigation do not officially exist...
...Not just any airplane, but the prince of single-engine planes, the Mercedes-like Beech Bonanza...
...The plane cost the yearly salaries of fifteen Appalachian social workers (another sublime thought...
...I know, because one day while flying with an instructor in my Bonanza through the clouds over Los Angeles, I became convinced we were nose down and losing altitude...
...We continued down to Big Sur, steep-turned around the lighthouse and got clearance from Monterey Approach to fly over Pebble Beach at 2,000 feet.You could see whitecaps crashing the shore and golfers on Pebble's fabled 17th green...
...Some blame the 1986 tax law, which wiped out deductions for individual owner-pilots...
...And thus today there is a Web-based liquid market in new aircraft, for pilots who want to own as little as one-eighth of an airplane...
...Had I done what every cell in my brain wanted me to do, I would have slowed the Bonanza's airspeed, perhaps to the point of a stall...
...Today, every pilot uses GPS if he has it, and most do...
...Instructors run $25 an hour in rural areas, up to $60 an hour near big cities.Throw in plane rentals and figure on about $10,000 to obtain a license...
...If you take up flying, you'll be in for a shock when you visit an airport and see the fleet of 1970's-vintage trainers...
...To do that, you'll need to obtain the next rung on the pilot ladder, an instrument certificate...
...I'm not going to bore you with the sad story of how Garage, corn's IPO never floated, or how, a few months after that, I actually started weeping when the mechanic presented a bill of $4,500 for what seemed to me hardly any work on three of the Bonanza's six cylinders—$4,500 for three cylinders...
...Nasdaq had just hit 5000...
...By speeding up information flow and lowering costs, the Net can "make markets" that had been previously too expensive or inconveniently "sticky...
...I doubled up to a quarter lease a month later...
...The newest versions even include pictographs of mountains, lakes and forbidden military airspace...
...And it takes a real crisis to kill them...
...Word is that 60 percent of students pass on their first try...
...It is the most fun I've ever had from a sport...
...On top of the down payment, I pay about $800 a month in Avgas and service fees...
...The evil shylocks convinced juries over the years that whenever a blind-drunk pilot flew over the mountains at night in a rainstorm and vanished, well, Cessna, you see, was to blame because it failed to warn him of this risk...
...It ignores it...
...In June I plunked down $8,000 for a one86 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 eighth lease of a brand new Cessna 172SP...
...Bureaucracies ratchet only one way—more authority...
...Both halves, incidentally, get to share another pleasure, dominion over the earth, precisely the feeling one enjoys at 5,500 feet on a clear day...
...Quite suddenly at age 45 I was gripped by the idea of launching myself skyward...
...A frightening moment comes when the examiner tells the student to close his eyes, then puts the plane in a dive, a stall or a near spin...
...In my book, yes...
...Looking solely at the instruments, the student is required to put the plane back on the straight and level within five seconds...
Vol. 34 • November 2001 • No. 8
