Recently, I took a ride in a biplane from the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum. I have this thing about aircraft - I'm kind of in love with flying over things in small aircraft. I love the adventure of it, and I'd never been in a biplane before. It wasn't cheap - $85 for 15 minutes, I believe, but it was an incredibly experience.
This renewed a thought my BF had had previously: to get his pilot's licence. Nothing fancy, he has no designs on flying a 747, but a private pilots license (ppl) has been an idea of his for a while.
So the other night, he says to me...the Ottawa Flying Club does introductory flights for $150. What do you think? (He doesn't say a lot, does my man.) As I said, I like flying over things in small aircraft, so I was all for doing an introductory flight. My BF explained that he'd like to get his private pilots license, and then maybe we could take some trips to places that it is extremely expensive to visit - like say the Canadian north.
All of this sounded great to me (really, I didn't need the explanation, I was all for flying) so we set up our intro flights for this weekend, and started to dream.
This is maybe where things went a little....far.
The other night, while enjoying a pint, the BF starts telling me about information he's been reading, and blogs that he has found. It turns out that a) you can fly from Ottawa to Iceland in a Cessna (obviously making stops along the way) and b) someone flew themselves to Africa from North America.
Which pretty much settled it for me: Why not do that ourselves? (I have never done things halfway, and I have always run before I could walk - ask my mother. I went from crawling to running; I skated backwards before I could skate forwards; I'm planning a trip around the world before I have a ppl).
So after much near-drunken exclamations about how cool it would be, we have decided: Our ten year plan is to:
* learn to fly, and acquire, our private pilots licenses.
* save up and buy an airplane - 2-seater at minimum, 4-seater a possibility
* take a year off work, then fly ourselves around the world.
It's a long range plan: We need to first get our licenses (the license itself is free, however the cost of renting a plane means that the average person pays $10000-15000), and then save up to buy our own plane. And considering what we wish to do, we'd rather get a newer plane. Not even taking into consideration that learning how to maintain the plane would also be a beneficial course of action.
Now, thankfully a cousin of mine is an aircraft mechanic at a small airport, so we can pick his brain for an idea of what kind of maintaince an airplane of that size will need in a one year time frame (considering how much it will be flown).
This renewed a thought my BF had had previously: to get his pilot's licence. Nothing fancy, he has no designs on flying a 747, but a private pilots license (ppl) has been an idea of his for a while.
So the other night, he says to me...the Ottawa Flying Club does introductory flights for $150. What do you think? (He doesn't say a lot, does my man.) As I said, I like flying over things in small aircraft, so I was all for doing an introductory flight. My BF explained that he'd like to get his private pilots license, and then maybe we could take some trips to places that it is extremely expensive to visit - like say the Canadian north.
All of this sounded great to me (really, I didn't need the explanation, I was all for flying) so we set up our intro flights for this weekend, and started to dream.
This is maybe where things went a little....far.
The other night, while enjoying a pint, the BF starts telling me about information he's been reading, and blogs that he has found. It turns out that a) you can fly from Ottawa to Iceland in a Cessna (obviously making stops along the way) and b) someone flew themselves to Africa from North America.
Which pretty much settled it for me: Why not do that ourselves? (I have never done things halfway, and I have always run before I could walk - ask my mother. I went from crawling to running; I skated backwards before I could skate forwards; I'm planning a trip around the world before I have a ppl).
So after much near-drunken exclamations about how cool it would be, we have decided: Our ten year plan is to:
* learn to fly, and acquire, our private pilots licenses.
* save up and buy an airplane - 2-seater at minimum, 4-seater a possibility
* take a year off work, then fly ourselves around the world.
It's a long range plan: We need to first get our licenses (the license itself is free, however the cost of renting a plane means that the average person pays $10000-15000), and then save up to buy our own plane. And considering what we wish to do, we'd rather get a newer plane. Not even taking into consideration that learning how to maintain the plane would also be a beneficial course of action.
Now, thankfully a cousin of mine is an aircraft mechanic at a small airport, so we can pick his brain for an idea of what kind of maintaince an airplane of that size will need in a one year time frame (considering how much it will be flown).
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| This is my "OH MY GOD THIS WILL BE EPIC! face |
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