DALFA

People just assumed, that's the problem. I asked a question...why couldn't people just answer it in a respectable manner?

JohnBurke

Some of the best counsel I got when I was in my early (teenage) flying years came from an instructor who read one of my solo logbook entries. Happy to be out flying alone, I went to see the fall leaves changing colors, poking around the canyons and the mountains, and called it "joyriding."

The instructor told me he'd better never see that in my logbook again.

I found that a much more productive method of putting in an hour of airplane rental involved preplanning exactly what I'd do on that flight. I had a card for every flight; it spelled out what I'd planned to do. Stalls, steep turns, etc. The number of them, the details. I learned to plan my flights to make the most use of every minute of flight time.

Got a private and working toward the instrument rating? Good time to buddy up, split time and play safety pilot, and trade off practicing instruction, approaches, and working together with someone else in the cockpit.

As a burgeoning ag aviator, I spent a lot of time doing low tight patterns on gravel strips. A typical pattern in a Cessna 150 would be about six minutes, averaged out...or about six landings an hour for a normal pattern at a thousand feet. A tight, close pattern at 100-200', however, with a turnaround and takeoff the opposite direction, could net fifteen or more an hour...lots more practice in a given hour. Ag may not be your cup of tea; it was mine (still is), and so my training was a little different, but you get the idea; squeezing as much experience out of every hour as possible.

When I did my commercial, I did it in an amphib seaplane, and did checkrides for single engine land and single engine sea. Again, squeezing as much out of it as possible. You want hours and experience, go add on a glider rating and work on that while you're flying. Cheap rental, and some good insight and experience into how to work a wing that you won't get droning from A to B and you mindlessly try to "build hours."

For what it's worth, I got about the same thing out of your posts that USMCFlyer did...sounds the same. The attitude of a lazy kid trying to do the very minimum.

You want to do it for less, there are ways. Go join CAP and use their aircraft. Buy a small experimental and fly the wings off it. Begin skydiving, get in with the local DZ, and start dropping jumpers. Fly gliders and tow them.

Flying isn't cheap. The expense, however, does tend to winnow out some who aren't dedicated enough or serious enough about the business. You may find it's too expensive to do at once. I took two years to get through the private...largely because I could only afford a little at a time, and that was a time when it was fifteen bucks an hour to rent. A year to solo, a year to private, and paying off my instructors by doing work for them as I went. Paying for the aircraft by doing maintenance, washing, waxing, detailing, doing books, fueling, etc. You do what you need to do, according to your level of dedication.

When I began working on my flight instructor, I gave presentations to schools, companies, ran ads in the papers, and took apart and airplane, and put it back together again inside a shopping mall for a display, advertising the business. I opened and ran a banner towing business to gain publicity and students, and towed an airplane through one of the longest parades in the country doing the same. I built models, gave demo rides, taught ground schools, gave CAP rides to cadets, and did a lot of other things to promote the business. I worked two jobs and turned wrenches as well, and worked around the clock. I did additional jobs on the weekends with jumpers and towing gliders.

How dedicated do you plan to be? Nobody needs to tell you anything, you've already got it all pegged, and you don't need to learn anything, just need to build hours because they're your almighty god? Your form of currency?

The altitude you fly is irrelevant for maximizing rental hours. It's all about RPM where rental is charged by the tach hour. The only question, then, is RPM. Where are you going to need your lowest power setting, and at what speed? If you have a private pilot certificate, you should know that. You shouldn't need anyone to explain best endurance, L/D max, or other such concepts to you, and you really don't need someone else to do your basic flight planning when it comes to figuring out how to conduct a flight. If you have a private, we (and the FAA) expect that you can do that all by yourself, without sniving about the quality of advice you've received, or the counsel, or whether you're smart enough to read between the lines and figure out the wisdom that's imparted to you. You're unhappy with that counsel, but it's not the counsel that's at fault; it's your ability to receive it.

UnderOveur

Because you are listening to refute, not to understand. And you haven't learned to check your ego at the door, either. Furthermore, it's a fact that folks like that tend to get other people killed in this business. Your ppl is a license to continue to learn, not puff your chest out and pretend you've mastered anything. As for "professional", when you start acting like one, then you can call others out for not doing so.

USMCFLYR

Ok then......
We got the part out about the answer to the original question being in the performance section of the POH.
Thread closed.