Before you click on the link let me give you some details.
They’re going to be running these flights out of Las Vegas. They fly you up and do the parabolic arc thing so you get weightless for about 25 seconds and they do this 15 times on the flight. So you get yourself about 6 and half minutes of floating time. And on the flight down they serve champagne.
Me personally? If I had the money to blow might spend as much as $250 for the experience. How about you?
My first instinct is to say, I wouldn’t. There is no amount of money which I would be interested in paying for the experience.
I don’t consider myself to be afraid of heights. But I hate ladders. I hate rides at amusement parks that turn upside down and make you think you will fall out on your head. (Ones that move fast while being upside down are less problematic and more enjoyable than those that just go upside down and pause.) I was less than enthusiastic about my flights in light aircraft.
There’s a part of me which thinks the idea is kinda cool, and therefore there might exist a price I’d be willing to pay, which would not enable them to make ends meet–you know, $5 or $10 or something silly like that.
And then there’s this part of me that says, no. Doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. More power to those for whom it would be a thrill, but count me out.
Not sure but I regret not spending the money for a ride on the Concorde. I think it was $400 for a quick trip into Canada and back. Damn.
I’ve always wanted to do that! The nearest I’ve come is in a Cessna and a Beechcraft, and there’s not enough room to fly around. (And when I was in the driver’s seat, that would not have been a good idea anyway.)
That said, they’re asking almost ten times what I’d pay for the experience.
I’d probably pay a few hundred. Let’s hope competition brings the price down.
I might pay a grand. 3+ is pushing it too much for me. I can skydive for much less than that. Not weightless, but pretty damned intense.
I’d probably go as high as $1,000 for that experience. But I’m quite sure that the actual asking price would be considerably more.
I can’t say how much I’d pay. I’d love to experience weightlessness, but any joy I’d get from the experience would be tempered by the fact that the fucking plane is plummeting towards earth!
I don’t think I could pay more than a grand for that feeling, and even that would be pushing it. For me to be happy to pay I’d say a few hundred - probably no more than five.
I love aviation more than some of my family. I am also very familiar with the super-economics that define the shocking costs of a large plane even idling for 15 minutes. However, someone asked me to go skydiving with them today later in the summer and the cost is $200 which sounds like a reasonable price for a memorable thrill. I can’t justify spending more than $1000 on a zero G flight especially when I know that you only get zero G about 30 seconds at a time and the flight pattern can make even experienced people quite sick.
I’d pay $250. And I’d skip the champagne. But that’s about as high as I’d go - I can think of other things I’d rather spend $3675 on.
But there’s plenty of room in a DC3. I have some video of guys I used to jump with going up in a DC3 and the pilot doing some 0-G parabolas. Funny watching skydivers float around inside the plane.
Jump ticket at the time was under $15.
A few weeks ago I was watching something on Comedy Central and there was a girls gone wild commercial on and I could have sworn they where on the parabola plane/vomit comet, but I thought that was only for training astronauts and I didn’t see the gov’t letting a bunch of girls go on it just so they could take off their shirts and get video taped. Guess it’s open to the public now.
BTW How do they plan on send Stephan Hawkins up. I’d imagine they’d have an issue with him slamming into the walls each time they go back up or land, and restraining him or his wheel chair to the floor would be kinda pointless.
I’ll give you five bucks if you don’t make me go on it.
I read an article years ago about the parabolic flights they use to train NASA astronauts, and one fact that has stuck with me over the years is that the plane was nicknamed the “Vomit Comet.” This would disincline me to pay any money for the flight.
However, if I were the type of person who would do such a thing, I think that I would pay roughly $200 for it.
I knew a guy who was part of the flight crew for this. He said that there was no such thing as a person who was fully immune to airsickness - given enough cycles, puke would ensue.
They may not have all that many takers for the champagne.
Deal. I promise never to make you go on it. You can Paypal my $5 to the e-mail address in my profile.
Anything else you want to pay me to not make you do? 
Ditto here. While tumbling through the cabin, my mind would be occupied by visions of the plane bottoming out and pulling up hard and the wings snapping off.
Anybody want to start a pool on how long it’ll take before there’s some sort of fatality? Either a crash, or an embolism, or an over-enthusiastic zero-G spin causing somebody to impale their eye socket on an armrest, or something?