In June a teen from Indiana took off, with his father acting as co-pilot, to become the youngest person to pilot an airplane around the world to raise money to build schools in Pakistan.
I’ve been seeing the headlines of his attempt in my aviation emails, but have not been following the story. This morning, I read that Haris Suleman and his father Babar had been killed in a crash off of Pago Pago, AS.
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Jessica Dubroff was not a pilot. Haris Suleman held a pilot’s certificate and an instrument rating. We’ll have to wait to find out the cause of the crash, but the crash that killed Dubroff is an example of extremely poor decision-making: Overloaded aircraft of a type that (in its original production) was known to be underpowered, Hi altitude, high density altitude, heavy rain, other pilots saying they wouldn’t fly in those conditions…
Dumb question, but what was the cost of the round-the-world single-engine plane trip and how much did they think they would raise for schools in Pakistan? Wouldn’t it have been more efficient to stay home and just send a check?
Plus there wouldn’t be a dead father and son.
People will often donate money to a cause when there’s a ‘stunt’ involved. Things like flying around the world, or even walking or running in a marathon will induce people to donate where a blurb on the news or an ad on Craigslist won’t.
I’d have to search, but I think the Sulemans raised something like $300,000 for the cause.
How much does it cost to fly a Bonanza around the world? The accident aircraft was built in 1976. They tend to go for about $150,000 to $175,000 or so. It may have been donated for the flight, or Babar Suleman may have owned or been part of the corporation that owned it. (Again, I haven’t been following the story.) I doubt they rented it. I don’t know how much it costs to operate an A36 Bonanza, but I did do some rough calculations for a Cessna Skyhawk. Based on a few guesses and a given number of flying hours per year, I came up with about $110/hour. A Bonanza is faster, more powerful, and more complex. A complete and total guess would be that it costs around $250 to $300 per hour to fly. I’m probably wrong. Book speed for an A36 says it cruises at 168 knots (193 smph). So find out how many miles their path was and divide that by the cruise speed, and multiply that from the operating cost. (They might have been flying for range instead of speed. That would change things.) Add in lodging, food, etc. The trip wouldn’t be cheap, but I think they would make more for the charity than it costs.
The young MIT student who just did it, also in a Bonanza, estimated the costs at $150K total, not including the cost of the airplane itself.
The Sulemans must have owned their plane themselves, including paying for long-range tanks in the cabin.
So what happened? The plane had a problem right after takeoff from a tropical location with full tanks. They can’t have made a density-altitude screwup, can they? Maybe fuel contamination?
Thanks for that.
Doing something fun that is expensive and getting other folks to pay for it to raise money kinda rubs me the wrong way generally.
Yeah, the cynical side of me envisions the progression as going from the ambition or desire to do something monumental and fun, to wondering how to pay for it, to let’s pretend it’s all for charity.
One of the difficult parts of running a charity is getting attention. There is a lot of competition for support and donations. Yes, there’s always a point where you wonder if the energy being put into staging an event should just be put into the charity itself, but it’s complex.
Where do you draw the line? Some people think it’s fun to run, so they enter the Susan G. Komen runs to raise money to fight breast cancer. It’s not expensive for them to do, but it’s fun. Is it wrong for them to do that? Or is it OK because the personal costs are low? What about the foundation itself? Could it be seen as ‘Let’s do something that gives us a cushy job, and pretend it’s to fight breast cancer’? Is there any reason why something can’t be fun and expensive, and also provide funds for charity? Should something that is fun and expensive not be used as a vehicle to raise awareness and funds, even though the activity will likely raise more money for the charity than might be raised by other means?
Personally, I’d love for someone to provide me with a plane and pay for an exciting trip. I can see where the cynicism comes in. OTOH, someone might have a cause and wonder how he can support it. He can volunteer for some activity; say, going to Pakistan in this case and helping to do the building. But raising six figures of money is better than a father and son providing manual labour. A celebrity can raise awareness and ask for donations because he is a celebrity. Most people need to contribute in other ways, and those ways need to be something they can do. In this case, the kid (and his dad) loved flying. It was something he could do. Even though the expenses were formidable, they likely raised more money after expenses than they would have by posting flyers around the neighbourhood or making a plea on the local news.
EDIT: Or what Marley23 said.
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Assuming the numbers in this thread are correct ($300k raised, $150k spent), and taking a quick look at Charity Navigator, that’s a pretty abysmal ratio of income to overhead. Compared to more conventional charities, this was not a good use of money, with the exception being if they were going to fly around the world anyway. In any case, this is all before you deal with the expenses of a plane crash and 2 dead people.
Johnny, As with any of my cynical views, I know it when I see it. 
Seriously though, the big orgabized charities that use pledges for miles walked or run seem fine to me. When I see someone who has a hobby, particularly an expensive hobby, and they conceive some grandiose plan to do something monumental with that hobby and then attach a charity to it, I’m in full cynical mode unless they prove otherwise.
This all started for me when a couple of acquaintenances who really like road bicycling decided to bike across the US. They bought a used travel trailer, enlisted a friend with a truck to drag the trailer, then when difficulties with the truck and the trailer cropped up just before the trip, it suddenly became a charity fund raiser in the name of another friend who had died. They suddenly weren’t spending their own money for the trip anymore. I think at the end of the whole thing they donated a few hundred dollars to a cancer charity. :rolleyes:
But how many people who contributed to this flight would have contributed directly to a charity? Most people don’t think, ‘Hey, you know what? Building schools in a third-world country would be good. I think I’ll find websites that rate charities, find the charities who want to build schools where I think they should be built, find the one that spends the most of the donations for the goal instead of overhead, and send them money!’? Probably not many.
I donate money to a couple of charities each year. They sell raffle tickets for airplanes. I don’t know where they get the planes. They might be donated, or they might be purchased by the charities. If the latter, they could just use the purchase price toward their goal. If the former, they could simply sell the airplane and use the money for their goal. But by raffling the airplane, they might raise $150,000 for a $30,000 asset. I’m never going to win one of these raffles. But if they didn’t exist, then I wouldn’t think to donate to the charities. That’s the point of ‘pulling stunts’; to get more people to donate.
I’m not sure you can compare one event to an organization like that, and not everybody agrees with Charity Navigator’s emphasis on overhead.
If you can generally afford to do it yourself it does rub me less wrong. And for that matter if that’s the case your probably doing it cause or no cause and you are just using your hobby to generate free publicity for the cause.
To play devil’s advocate here, at some point you should probably call shenanigans on this logic – raising $300,000 using $295,000 for overhead doesn’t stand up to the same scrutiny when you say “But that’s $5000 that they wouldn’t have otherwise.” I mean, I guess that’s technically true, but you also have hundreds of people who might not donate that money to another “stunt” charity with a more effective overhead ratio. Opportunity costs and whatnot.
FWIW, I think raffles are a bit different. I might enter a raffle to win a car even if no money goes to charity. It’s unlikely that I’d give money to someone to fly around the world without the charity connection.
In my area, there are often those raffles in which the prize is a house worth a million or two. There are only a small number of tickets sold (perhaps 500 or a thousand). But in the fine print, there is a clause that if the ticket sales are too low, the final prize will be less than the value of the fancy house. So there is no risk (or at least little risk) to the charity of losing money.
One of the charities I buy raffle tickets from says that they will only sell a certain number of tickets, and that the drawing will be held on a given date regardless of how many tickets are sold. The other one says they will sell a certain number of tickets, and the drawing will be held after all of the tickets are sold. In the former case, there is a risk that the value of the prize will be less than the amount collected. In the latter case, they will collect several times the amount of money than they would have if they had just sold a donated airplane or used their own funds that they would have spent to buy a plane for the raffle. The tickets are cheap enough ($50 each) and the odds are good enough that it’s virtually guaranteed that they will come out well ahead.