No matter how expensive a home sim you make, it won’t ever get be even a quarter of what an actual entry amateur plane costs to buy and maintain. It’s not even the plane itself either, it’s all the recurring costs like storage, maintenance, spare parts, fuel, certification fees, taxes, etc. The only cheap flight option for a recreational pilot is bushcraft light planes. And they will still cost more than the sim setup, while you’ll only be able to fly it on certain places, during certain weather, at certain times of the year. The rest of the time you’ll still have to pay all the storage and maintenance fees. Planes are incredibly expensive.
Yeah, you’ll be able to actually use it when life allows you, vs restructuring your whole life around being able to fly.
Now we just need one for where millionaires think their work is saving the world. Apparently the city building sims aren’t sufficient.
Well they keep triggering tornadoes and alien attacks and shit.
Yes and no. I bought a property with a double wide and a 5000 square foot hangar on it located on a private strip. The rent from the double wide and the other hangar spots I rent pays the mortgage and all the expenses related to the property. I own a j3 cub that I have about 30k into that I fly daily in Florida and maintain it myself for practically nothing. Affordable aviation is possible but you have to be very smart about how you go about doing it, and a good bit of luck is involved to get the right deals by being in the right place at the right time.
Oh sure, just go buy a big enough property to have a hanger and a private landing strip on it. Cheap and easy!
If you’re ok with living in the middle of nowhere, then it’s entirely doable. Some folks just have different priorities.
For instance, here is a property in Yucca Valley, CA that has a hanger in the backyard, where you can head out right on the runway from your yard. Just under $300k. There’s an entire street of houses that are adjacent to the runway of a small municipal airstrip, I think they call them fly in/fly out communities. They’re often well off the beaten path, but you don’t have to pay for storage when you have a hanger out back.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/57544-Sunnyslope-Dr-Yucca-Valley-CA-92284/17496243_zpid/
I’m not saying that those deals are bad, but we are still talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, where a sim setups is 30k or 40k at most.
Dude I have a mortgage. I put 25k down on the property. I rent out the house and 3 spots in the hangar. I get enough income from rent on the property to pay the mortgage and have profit on top every month. I’m not a rich by any means. But I live comfortably enough.
I mean, I hope you get rich mate! Yeah I understand your point, and I am also definitely happy that affordable aviation is not a multimillionaire only dream. Though still those simulations are maybe 5 percent of the costs we are talking, yet :(
All that hardware and then just… a chair.
Not to mention the Ikea table.
AITA for asking my wife to respect my title a pilot?
I need the opinions of avgeeks and pilots on a matter involving my wife. I AM COMPLETELY SERIOUS AND I NEED HELP. /srs
My wife and I (together for 5 years, married for 2, no kids) have an amazing, happy relationship. I can’t recall a single time we’ve ever argued to the point of a breakup or divorce. This issue, however, is causing me to reconsider the health of our relationship. Since my wife and I have been together, I have worked as a manager for a restaurant chain. I am an extremely passionate aviation enthusiast in my free time. I have spent thousands of dollars on flight textbooks, sim gear, and even built my own a330 setup. I have never actually flown a plane or started flight training, but I have considered it for a long time. Even though my skills are not a career, I still consider myself as adept or possibly more knowledgeable than the average pilot.
That being said, here’s where the problem arises. My wife and I were invited to one of her male coworkers house for a barbecue. My wife is a senior software tech for a Covid startup. She’s worked there since 2020, a lucky catch after she was laid off from her previous job due to the virus. It was my first time meeting many of her now-close coworkers due to Covid and working from home. I had assumed she’d talked about me before, but as we were cycling through introductions I became less sure. We make our way down the line to the host of the party, a new male hire that she has grown platonically close with. We exchange casual conversation and Greg (host) asked what I do for a living. My wife chimes in with “He manages a [insert fast food chain], it certainly comes with some benefits (I’m assuming she’s referring to free food)”, in a voice that implied nothing was wrong with what she said. I very quickly corrected her and told him that I am a pilot. My wife already knows how insecure I am about my job and how I’d much rather be introduced by my hobby. I’ve earned the title of pilot through my 500+ hours on and sim and thousands of dollars put into my craft. I think it is incredibly disrespectful for her not to acknowledge my skills and training. Just because I don’t have the title of pilot on an overpriced piece of paper doesn’t mean I’m not a pilot.
I laughed it off with Greg, told him under my breath that my wife was often forgetful (which I’m sure he’s realized just from working with her). He seemed to brush it off casually. At this point, I’m fuming, but I don’t go much farther than exchanging some nasty glances at my wife for the rest of the night. As we pack into the car to leave, the argument starts. She feels as if I don’t deserve my title as a Pilot because I’m not professional. I told her she is completely insensitive to the work i’ve done and she will never understand what it’s like to study so much. She’s currently on the couch as I type this. Am I really the asshole for asking to be respected?
Lmao how fucking niche but relevant
I just looked it up, FAA would require 1500 hours flight time, only 50 of which can be sim time, so this copypasta character is stupid both if you know and if you don’t know.
The double-standard on display here is just disgusting. Sure, it’s perfectly fine to modify your home entertainment system into a fake airplane but I try a little remodeling to make work feel more like home and it’s all “security will escort you off the premises” and “we’re taking away your pilot’s license”. Boils my blood.
The $20 chair is definitely a statement of priorities and my favorite part of the image.
Most people mention the costs of owning aircraft vs a sim, but there’s another possible reason: health. People come in different shapes and forms and not everyone who loves aviation is able to get II or even III medical class. So flight simulation is their only option to be a “pilot”.
I mean, on VATSIM (popular aviation simulation network) there’s a group of visually impaired people who have made a special interface so they can fly an aircraft even though they can’t see!
Simulation (of any kind) gives many people what they can’t get in any other way. And as with any other hobby, as long as it’s not damaging to other aspects of your life, let people enjoy what they want
That’s just a mid-range setup. The real simmers have at least 3 monitors.
Man, at some point it might be cheaper to buy a plane.
A plane. A cheap, 2-4 seat prop plane. A full sim rig can fly ANY PLANE and spaceships too!
I am not in any way a sim gamer of any of these sorts. My inputs are keyboard, mouse, or controller. And I suck at everything I play, and I try to limit my gaming time (and expenditures on gaming).
But I kind of get it, you know?
I would love to work on a project to build a thing that could reconfigure itself to match any existing cockpit. That would be sick. Maybe like a bunch of self-arranging robot building blocks and each has a different kind of switch or dial. Or each one can simulate it, hopefully in 3D with force feedback. They crawl into position and lock arms to form the cockpit. Send a command and the F-16 rearranges itself into an airbus 380. Or a corvette.
I see you dying in an accident testing the g-force simulator you built. 😁
just buy a plane
Yeah, I don’t think you can get a Mig-29 or a F-16 off e-bay, amazon or craigslist.
You can probably get a Cessna.
The cheapest Cessna (say a half-a-century old Cessna-150 with only a thousand or hours left on the engine before mandatory refurbishment) will set you back maybe $20k.
Then there’s the maintenance costs (one every 50 flight hours, a bigger one every 100 flight hour and so on as well as the yearly one), plus insurance and fuel.
Oh, and flying one of those planes is not really excitting (except for landings, those are cool) mainly because it cruises at 90 knots airspeed (about 160 Km/h) which at the minimum flying height per flight regulations (except during takeoff and landing) which is 1000 feet (around 300m) does not feel at all fast.
Absolutelly, spend $30k (if you get it as a kit and assemble it yourself) and you can get something a little more excitting … or spend $2k in that setup (I’m guessing, assuming you assemble it yourself) and let the Suspension Of Disbelief save you the rest of the money and you can even fligh planes that cost many millions of dollars (which, judging by the controls, is what that setup is simulating).
Mind you a Commercial Pilot License is “only” 1000 flight hours so you might get it for less than $100k depending on which country you do your training in and hence the cost per hour in the air (or, if you do like my Amateur Pilot Trainers in the UK and give lessons for the flight hours, which can be done with only an Amateur Pilot License) though you’ll get a lot of “special moments” with trainees at the controls (did I mention landings are exciting ;)).
Pretty cool with the overhead and side panels.
Yeah but what percentage of them are actually functional? In MS Flight Sim half the buttons in the planes do nothing.
Maybe I just want to try that obviously terrible approach to check if I’m right about my skills you know?
Have to land that Harrier vertically on the side of a dam.
A friend of mine makes force feedback controllers and he has like so much business from guys like that.
