ChugiakTinkerer
Confused about dryer sheets
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2017
- Messages
- 8
Hello FIRE aviators, my wife and I are a few years out from FI and are finally starting to work up a bucket list. Chief among those is taking up general aviation. We live in Alaska and plan to stay here for a long time to come, and having easy access to so much of this beautiful land makes flying irresistible.
Neither of us have any time with an instructor, although we both have been in small aircraft plenty of times and have familiarity and comfort with the idea of flying. We have some remote property and have hired an air taxi several times to land us on the lake. Our pilot is about my age, and one concern I have is that he'll get the retirement bug too and head south emulating Jimmy Buffet.
We're at a point in the retirement planning to where we have our future expenses pretty well charted out. There are unknowns of course, but it looks like I can still RE at age 58 and cover the costs of a small plane and about 200 hours of flying per year.
I am seeking the advice and opinons (yes, I said that) of anyone who has or had a PPL. The questions I am kicking around are, in no particular order:
1. Should we wait until retirement to start? At that point we'll have much more time to learn and access to funds which are currently in retirement accounts.
2. Our ideal plane would probably be a taildragger 4-place, with a useful load of over 1,000 lbs. Should we hold off on that and buy a beater nose-wheel plane to learn on first?
3. Heaps of other questions, but there are probably too many to really list. I understand that for many flying becomes a passion and a lifestyle choice. I'd welcome your thoughts on how to more readily accommodate that into our FIREd life.
Neither of us have any time with an instructor, although we both have been in small aircraft plenty of times and have familiarity and comfort with the idea of flying. We have some remote property and have hired an air taxi several times to land us on the lake. Our pilot is about my age, and one concern I have is that he'll get the retirement bug too and head south emulating Jimmy Buffet.
We're at a point in the retirement planning to where we have our future expenses pretty well charted out. There are unknowns of course, but it looks like I can still RE at age 58 and cover the costs of a small plane and about 200 hours of flying per year.
I am seeking the advice and opinons (yes, I said that) of anyone who has or had a PPL. The questions I am kicking around are, in no particular order:
1. Should we wait until retirement to start? At that point we'll have much more time to learn and access to funds which are currently in retirement accounts.
2. Our ideal plane would probably be a taildragger 4-place, with a useful load of over 1,000 lbs. Should we hold off on that and buy a beater nose-wheel plane to learn on first?
3. Heaps of other questions, but there are probably too many to really list. I understand that for many flying becomes a passion and a lifestyle choice. I'd welcome your thoughts on how to more readily accommodate that into our FIREd life.