No I see what you’re saying, I just don’t see how it relates to the career path of a commercial pilot. Entry level training isn’t the difference between a pilot who gets a lot of decision making experience and one that doesn’t.
I’m saying you don’t get the experience I’m talking about by flying charter.
But everyone does entry level training, nobody is missing out on that bit.
Entry level training is not the same as flying privately over time. It’s anecdotal because of sample size but I’ve seen many a zero-to-commercial pilot who sucked at landings.
Very interesting discussion. I can see why many starter pilots can’t afford a new aircraft these days, unlike in, say, the Fifties. Are there rent-to-own companies, or timeshare companies, or rent-by-the-hour (or -day) companies? Or other businesses that can, or might, more effectively address the problem of too-expensive planes?
Aircraft are typically rented by the hour, ‘wet’. ‘Wet’ means fuel and oil. Most places charge by Hobbes hour, the time the engine is running. (It used to be when the master switch was on, which caused consternation when a renter forgot to turn off the master switch. I don’t know if the Hobbes meter is running off the master switch as opposed to an oil pressure switch nowadays.) Clubs often charge by tach hour, which at lower RPM is less than what’s on the Hobbes meter.
As far as ‘timeshare companies’, those are typically aero clubs. You pay dues, and then rent the club’s aircraft.
It’s really common for pilots to enter aircraft partnerships. Most planes are cheaper to rent unless you fly more than 50-100 hours per year (depending on the plane and jow you want to treat it), which many private pilots don’t. Private aircraft have serious fixed costs - annual inspections, hangaring, etc. The more you fly, the cheaper per hour it gets.
Let’s say you buy a used Cessna 172. The airplane costs $50,000. At 5%, the cost of money is $2500/yr. An outdoor tie-down might cost anywhere from $20 to $100 per month. If you want to hangar it, you’ll pay at least $200/mo. Let’s assume a tie-down, and $50/mo.
Annual inspections might average $1500/yr. Sometimes they are cheaper, sometimes you get hit with a large bill. Insurance varies, could be as low as $250 or higher than $1000. Call it $750.
So we’ve got fixed costs coming in somewhere around $5,000 per year. If you fly 100 hours, that’s around $50 per hour. If you only fly 20 hours, you’re paying $250/hr just in fixed costs. So you have to fly a LOT to justify a small plane financially. But if you can find four other people to go in with you, your cost per hour goes way down.
Then there are variable costs: gas, oil, maintenance. A Lycoming O-320 has a 2000 hour time between overhauls. An overhaul costs around $20,000, so budget $10/hr for the engine overhaul. Add in another $5 for other wear items. If you have a constant speed prop, add another $5/hr.
Fuel: Avgas (100LL) is about $6/gallon. A 172 burns 7-9 gallons per hour. Call it 8, for a fuel cost of $48/hr.
So… if you fly 100 hours per year and you own a 172, you’ll spend about $11,000, or $110/hr. A rental 172 costs anywhere from $150 to $180 per hour, so in this scenario you could save money by buying. However, you are also taking on added risk. A sudden airworthiness directive on an expensive part could cost you $10,000. If you want to repaint the aircraft, it can cost $20,000.
And look what happens if you only fly an average of 50 hours per year. You still have the variable costs of $63/hr, but your fixed costs are now $100/hr. It’s now wiser to rent than buy, since it costs roughly the same and you don’t have the risks and ownership headaches.
To be sure there are much cheaper planes out there. Our Grumman worked out like this: 4.5 gals per hour, a 2400 TBO engine that we never had to rebuild, so it cost us nothing. Our tie-down was $20/mo, Insurance on a cheap plane was only $200/yr. I always did owner-assisted annuals, and we paid an average of $400/yr. The plane only cost $13,000, so the cost of money was about $650.
So, $1500/yr in fixed costs, and just the cost of gas per hour. At 100 hours per year, our operating cost was about $42/hr. At the time, a rental Cessna 150 at the same club was about $65 wet, and a 172 was around $90-100.
I didn’t include depreciation, because used airplanes don’t really depreciate. Or rather, they depreciate as the engine is used up, but that’s accounted for in the overhaul fund. If you buy an airplane with a half-time engine, fly it until the engine is TX’d then rebuild it, at that point the airplane is likely to be worth more than what it was when you bought it.
If this all sounds expensive per hour, it’s just because in aviation we try to account for everything. If you did the same accounting on your car, you might be shocked at hiw much you pay per hour - especially if it’s something like a new sports car that only gets driven occasionally. You can start with the 40% of purchase value you lose in the first two years.
Just a further note on my earlier comment about the Mentour Pilot YouTube channel hosted by Petter Hornfeldt. I’ve been watching more of it and this is a cute video of a young woman, a former flight attendant, who wants to become an airline pilot and is in the early stages of training, mostly just with some Cessna experience. Petter walks her though the takeoff and landing of a 737 in a flight simulator, and she does pretty well. I was surprised at his instruction about the greater importance of keeping the plane centered on approach compared to a Cessna, because the 737 is apparently more sensitive to small deviations, which seems counter-intuitive – I would have thought there would be much more response lag.
Another thing I found of interest – not in this video but in many others – was the trim wheels in the 737. Petter mentions that it’s fairly unique in modern airliners to have manual trim controls directly coupled by wire to the stabilizer jackscrew. In many of the videos, the trim wheels are spinning like crazy, sounding like a freaking sewing machine. If that happens a lot in normal flight I would find it quite disconcerting (and I can see why you’re actually at risk of injury if the manual-trim handle happens to be pulled out!).
The Robinson R22 has a trim knob, called ‘right trim’. Pull the knob up, and a bungee exerts a right force on the collective to ease the pressure a little on landing. The whole landing checklist was ‘Right trim: ON’. 
I much preferred the ‘coolie hat’ on the Schweizer. (I don’t know if there is a politically correct term for ‘coolie hat’, other than ‘four-way trim switch’.)
The issue is that in a fast airplane small errors in heading or pitch quickly produce large displacements in distance. Conversely, in a slow airplane, small errors in bank quickly produce large changes in heading, unlike a faster airplane.
The larger displacement errors can quickly get uncorrectable in the time/space remaining as you get closer to the ground. It’s more of a balancing on a beachball effect where the key is to stay centered, not to chase towards (then through) centered & back.
The noise is irritating, but beats the 707/727 system that looked the same but sounded more like a garbage disposal than a sewing machine. Or the horrid artificial MEEEEP MEEEEP MEEEEP that the D-9/MD-80 had.
In cruise it occasionally runs a turn, but it’s normally only “busy” during takeoff, climbout, & approach.
If it’s busy unexpectedly, that’s your clue something is wrong. In that way that’s better than the 757 / 767 & 777 that have zero indication the trim is moving. I assume but don’t know the 787 is the same.
Thanks for your explanation, SS. I learned a lot - ignorance fought!
Thanks for the clarifications, @LSLGuy. Always nice to have my curiosity satisfied by a knowledgable pro!
I don’t know if you’ve bothered watching any of those videos, but one of the undercurrents running through them is that Hornfeldt seems very fond of the 737. I seem to recall hearing somewhere, before the MAX debacle, that the 737 was not only one of the most widely used, but also one of the safest, jetliners ever made.
He is also fond of his two dogs, who are frequently in the videos, occasionally with little cartoonish captions over their heads, like when one dog gets up and walks out: “This guy is never gonna shut up. I’m outta here.” 
I got pummeled for this in the other thread about the 737 Max crashes but the trim in in this plane makes noise and is visually indexed. In this pod cast the pilot refers to it as something of a 3rd pilot in the plane because of the amount feedback it gives.
If you got “pummeled” for that it wasn’t by me. My problem, with all respect, was your absolute insistence that there was nothing whatsoever wrong with the MAX and that the two fatal crashes were all due to “pilot error”. One might conclude from this that its grounding for over a year and all the changes that Boeing made during that time were all for nothing.
I think the reality is, in the full perspective of time, that more experienced and better trained pilots would have handled the situations better, but that nevertheless the MAX as originally released had faults that were potential hazards and that needed to be fixed. One factor alone – the lack of adequate documentation about MCAS – was appalling.
Well everybody missed my point. I think it was an easily identifiable problem on the most basic of flight skills. it required they flip a switch that’s deliberately located in front of the trim wheels specifically to make it easy to find and associate with the trim system.
Put another way, the plane was experiencing a mechanical that their training should have identified and corrected long before they lost control of the plane.
That doesn’t absolve Boeing of their design flaw. They’re still on the hook for this.But IMO the crew failed on a very primal level of flying skill. The only argument given in their support was that it was intermittent but that doesn’t explain allowing it to continue to trim nose down. It wasn’t a secret. it was the trim system… If the trim system is not behaving then trim it manually.
I blame the crew for failing to correct a mechanical that was the result of a Boeing system defect. It required basic observation of a serious out of-trim situation and the proper response was to flip a switch before it got out of control.
Taking a year to fix a flawed design only fixes the flay. It won’t fix the lack of skill that will still be their for the next mechanical.
And the reason I brought this up is because of your observation that the trim wheels are specifically designed to give immediate feedback. And you’re not even a pilot. If it’s obvious to you then you’re reinforcing my point that it should have been obvious to (2) airline pilots.
I’m not going to rehash this all over again in this thread. But that is ridiculously simplistic. You either haven’t read, or have forgotten, the accident reports. The switches (there are two) were not the issue.
The switch(s) to turn off the electric trim system were not disengaged in a timely manner. And it really was that ridiculously simple to disengage the system from runaway trim. That’s their only purpose.
And I agree. Not the place for the discussion.
What do you mean by “zero to commercial pilot”? I didn’t think that was a thing in the USA.
Regardless, doing significant hours flying privately has never been a common part of a commercial pilot’s progression.
You might do 50-100 hours of general flying while building hours towards a CPL but that’s about it. Those hours are totally insignificant in the context of a career (it’s a month of flying).
I remember seeing ads all the time in the magazines. Little time now to read magazines, let alone ads. Here’s the first one I found on a Google search:
The total cash price of this program is $80,995. This includes your Private certificate, instrument rating, commercial single and multi-engine certificates, and your CFI and CFII.
So programmes exist, for a given value of ‘airline’. Our local ‘airline’ flies Cessna 206s. Scheduled seaplane flights are available from Kenmore Air in Seattle.