That's not why I quit

Post #283,343 by tuberculosis 4/29/07 10:15:35 PM 8/21/07 5:58:17 AM Reply	That's not why I quit has to do with 1) Congestion - I learned to fly in rural New Mexico. Flying was fun, casual, wide open spaces. Even ABQ INTL was easy to get in and out of. In Denver, the DIA control area overlies nearly the entire metro area - the control burden is high, and the traffic at local airports so bad that on a Saturady I'll have burned half an hour of engine time waiting in line to take off. Meanwhile, once airborne, you spend all your time taking orders from the tower. 2) Planes cost too much and don't offer adequate utility for the price. We're still stuck with 1940's technology. 3) Lack of affordable destinations and insurmountable logistical issues once arriving. In NM, most small airports had a beater car with the keys in it. You just borrow it to go into town and replace the gas. I haven't seen that in more developed areas. Bottom line, flying isn't worth the money anymore. All the fun has been regulated out of it. We posture as apostles of fair play, as good sportsmen, as professional knights-errant-- and we throw beer bottles at the umpire when he refuses to cheat for our side...We save the black-and-tan republics from their native [statesmen]--and flood them with "deserving" democrats of our own. We deafen the world with our whoops for liberty--and submit to laws that destroy our most sacred rights...We play policeman and Sunday-school superintendent to half of Christendom--and lynch a darky every two days in our own backyard. H.L. Mencken, 1914 Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 05:58:17 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #283,396 by mmoffitt 4/30/07 1:20:29 PM Reply	I call B.S. ...most small airports had a beater car with the keys in it. You just borrow it to go into town and replace the gas. I haven't seen that in more developed areas. Have you looked at an AOPA Airport Directory in the past 5 years? Is Corona, CA "developed" enough? They have a courtesy car and van. How about Hawthorne, CA? They've got a courtesy car, too. And it's not just California. There are a TON of places that have courtesy cars. Most of the fields I've flown into still have them and while the number of Class E & G airports is going down, there are still a lot of them left and the majority of them have courtesy cars. Your other points are well taken. If you live in a large, urban area and you're foolish enough to hangar your piston aircraft at a controlled field, then yeah, GA can suck. More precisely, all the controls the FAA has come up with "to keep us safe" suck and they're going to get worse. I'm absolutely convinced that the FAA/DHS duo from hell will not be happy until there is no more uncontrolled flight in the entire country. I'm going to read the article Ashton wrote now, but Boyer's quote above is on mark in my view. Saturday and Sunday was beautiful up here. Where'd I spend Saturday? 6am - 4pm daughter's tennis tournament I hauled food and water for. 4pm-4:30pm take a daughter to work, 5pm-8pm running around with the other daughter. Sunday, 9am-10am polish the airplane. 10:30-4pm tennis with daughter again, 4:25pm - 6pm, took daughter to the mall to buy shoes for her prom. Got home at 7:30pm. So much for those 2 VFR days and that is exactly for the reason Boyer said. Wife was working nights Fri-Sun and was sleeping during the day, which left me to haul kids around. For me, I have way more weekends like the last one than I do free. And that definitely cuts into my flying. bcnu, Mikem It would seem, therefore, that the three human impulses embodied in religion are fear, conceit, and hatred. The purpose of religion, one might say, is to give an air of respectibility to these passions. -- Bertrand Russell
Post #283,401 by tuberculosis 4/30/07 2:17:14 PM 8/21/07 6:00:55 AM Reply	Well you could say the same about boats Not enough hours to get on the water with family obligations. And I admit that I'm comparing NM to Denver area - which is a mother of a control area that claims everything over to the mountains the small planes can't fly over plus an hour's drive north and south of the city and two hours drive east. Kinda locks one out. I also used to fly at Pontiac in Mich - that was a controlled field that wasn't too awful busy. But I think that has changed from what I hear. We posture as apostles of fair play, as good sportsmen, as professional knights-errant-- and we throw beer bottles at the umpire when he refuses to cheat for our side...We save the black-and-tan republics from their native [statesmen]--and flood them with "deserving" democrats of our own. We deafen the world with our whoops for liberty--and submit to laws that destroy our most sacred rights...We play policeman and Sunday-school superintendent to half of Christendom--and lynch a darky every two days in our own backyard. H.L. Mencken, 1914 Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 06:00:55 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #283,406 by Andrew Grygus 4/30/07 2:56:33 PM Reply	And it's going to stay stuck in the '40s It got so every time a GA aircraft crashed the manufacturer was sued for some imagined defect. Any innovation just means more lawsuits so why do it? [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]

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