To be clear it wasn't a near disaster (*rolls eyes*), and I had several outs. I wasn't even in violation of the regs; I was more than 500 AGL and was more than the minimum required distance from people or a populated area (I was out over the ocean). Now had I not had the training I had with an instructor who believed in pushing the envelope--well, someone who has been trained to live in fear of the rules could have been led to believe they had no outs when in fact there were several staring them in the face. Like landing rather than crashing in a box canyon.

The point being the whole "if a private pilot gets ill he dies and takes out everyone with him" but "a driver who gets ill can safely pull over" is a false dichotomy--given the serious number of accidents and fatalities that have arisen when a driver got ill or got confused.

Yes, the challenges of getting ill while flying are different than the challenges of getting ill while driving. However, it doesn't mitigate the potential for death or damage just because you're on a freeway or highway or even on surface streets.

It is worth noting that the AOPA and other organizations track the number of fatalities due to different circumstances while flying--and suddenly getting ill and crashing and dying is not very high up on the list. Instead, things like spinning or stalling an airplane while landing or a VFR pilot flying into a cloud then losing control, or a night time pilot flying into terrain are far more likely to create problems than getting ill and not being able to put the plane down.

Besides, most places where people fly, there is usually an airport maybe 15 or 20 minutes out--and in an emergency situation you are permitted by the regs to land anywhere , including a highway or a strip of grass somewhere. (FAR 91.3, my favorite FAR.)

Unless the driver is on a busy freeway, at which point expect a multiple-car accident with a handful of deaths. Or unless the driver is driving through a busy pedestrian mall. Or the driver has a senior moment and makes a wrong turn.

I think it's a matter of finding the right instructor.

My instructor for my private was an old curmudgeonly fellow who had been flying since the 60's, who was an electrical engineer prior to retiring, hanging out at the airport and training pilots. Fantastic fellow.

His attitude towards the rule book was "learn it, follow it, and let's go flying when you shouldn't so you can learn what can go wrong." (Example: one day I got to the field to find a layer of crud hanging low over the hills. His attitude? "Let's go skud running so you can learn what it's like, in case you find yourself in that situation some day." So we're out there, 500' over the freeway, flying through the canyon that separates Whiteman Airport from the Santa Clarita area, buzzing the 14 freeway through the Newhall Pass, and he's telling me the things to watch out for, like tall towers and telephone wires. (Hint: if you have to skud run, follow the freeways; generally the air above freeways are clear of invisible obstructions, though in a canyon pass all bets are off.) His approach to spin awareness training was to take the controls, put the plane into a nascent spin, and handing me back the controls to pull it out. And we did some canyon running, as well as some night flying in 'black hole' areas, learning telltale signs to see if you're safe against invisible "rocks".)

I think it's made me a better pilot, quite frankly--not because I go around flying recklessly all the time. I'm actually quite conservative. That said, if I find myself in the thick of things--like I did once flying into Montgomery Airport and buzzing the ocean at 600' to keep under the marine layer that unexpectedly rolled in--I know what to do and how to do it in a safe manner.

(Oh, and the Montgomery Airport story: that only happened to me once, and the day after that happened I signed up for my instrument rating so it would never happen again.)

Besides, just click "Plain Language" when you get an on-line briefing on duats.com, and it will translate the METARs and TAFs and PIREPs into plane language. How hard is that?

Generally renting an airplane is done by "Hobbes Time"--basically the amount of time the airplane is running, not when it's just sitting on the ground. That means that 4 hour lunch to an airport 60 miles away in an airplane that rents for $110/hour does not cost $440. It costs more like $150, assuming about 0.7 hours each way. (Some rental companies charge a minimum Hobbes time for overnight stays; one club I belonged to charged a minimum 2 hour/day charge for overnight stays; if you fly less than 2 hours that day they rounded up to 2 hours.)

It's extremely common to see pilots use the old ILS/VOR receivers in their airplane coupled with software like ForeFlight for the iPad. The ForeFlight subscription is cheap--perhaps $150/year for geo-referenced IFR charts and geo-referenced taxi-way charts as well as updated VFR maps. That's how I got my instrument ticket, by the way: steam gauges and ForeFlight on my iPad. (ForeFlight for situational awareness, and the steam gauges to make it all legal.)

It comes across as curmudgeony because there are a lot of curmudgeons who are attracted to the field, and who are spending every spare dime they can find on their love of flying. And once you get your ticket who can resist the challenge of going up in an old biplane, just for the heck of it?

That said, I agree that part of the problem is regulations: taking a car engine (which can easily operate at 10,000') and putting it into an airplane is damned near impossible without years of regulatory work--and why do that when a Lycoming based on 1930's technology is already certified by the FAA? And don't get me started on glass panels costing $20,000 when a handheld (with similar features) cost under $1000 but can't be legally used to shoot an IFR approach.

See, for me, I found that a lot of fun, once I got over my air sickness. Unlike some pilots I love doing pattern work, because I love the challenge of landing the airplane, and trying to finesse each landing to make it into 'greaser' (where you only hear the wheels touch down, you don't feel it). I could go out right now and do pattern work all day and be extremely happy.

But that's a personal thing--and if this ain't your thing, it ain't your thing. Like people who don't like building computers from scratch (like me)--if you don't like doing it, then don't.

When I started working towards private pilots license (just got my instrument rating), I calculated on a map of California the circles where it made more sense to fly a rented plane (assuming 100 knots ground speed) than to drive or fly commercially.

My starting assumption was that from door to wheels up at the local airport was about 1 hour; it took 45 minutes to drive to the airport, prep the airplane, and get it off the ground to my destination. Add 15 minutes at the other end parking at an FBO and paying for parking and getting a rental car from the FBO. (Many FBOs will meet you on the ramp in your rental, so the time to rent a car at an FBO is very *VERY* short.)

My starting assumption for commercial was that door to rental car at the destination was about 4 hours; that's the time it takes to drive to the airport (1 to 2 hours in my case, depending on traffic), get checked out by TSA, board the aircraft--then the aircraft would proceed to its destination at approximately 550 knots ground speed. Add an hour at the other end to get your luggage and get a rental car.

For driving I assumed 60mph on the freeways on average. (That was actually somewhat optimistic, I know.)

It turns out that from where I lived (before we moved) traveling from Glendale, CA (just north of downtown Los Angeles) to Santa Barbara was just about break-even between driving and flying, assuming no traffic. (Hah!) And flying to Oregon was just about break-even between renting a plane, and flying commercially--assuming you were flying to a larger airport and not to one of the dozens of smaller strips at interesting locations around the area. (Many cities in northern California are serviced by a GA airport, but flying there commercially and you need to add in another hour or two of driving time since the nearest commercial airport may be a hundred miles away.)

That's a whole lot of real estate that--time wise--renting a Cessna 172 makes far more sense than flying commercially.

And from a money perspective, some airports have absurdly high ticket prices to fly there commercially. (Napa Valley, I'm looking at you.) Meaning it would actually be cheaper to pay $110/hour for a rental and fly there from Los Angeles with my wife, than buy two commercial airline tickets.

While getting my private pilots license I started thinking perhaps drivers should be required to get a biennial drivers test, complete with written and with a DMV ride-along.

That, after almost getting side-swipped as I was pulling out of the airport parking lot after a day doing some solo work in the pattern on a particularly windy day.

Then join a flying club, buy your own aircraft or buy partial ownership in an aircraft. There are many ways to bring that $175/hour down if you fly a lot.

(The flying club I used to belong to before I moved would rent a 172 for $104/hour wet.)

The reality is the hourly rate is high because of maintenance costs and fuel costs: two hours in a 172 burns 16 gallons of gas at $6.50/gallon. And unless you have a small aircraft (like a Diamond DA-20 or a Liberty Aerospace) that 4 hour round trip is going to burn a couple of hundred bucks of gas right there without taking into account maintenance, oil changes, inspections and the like. Meaning unless you get something like the DA-20 or the XL2, you're looking at burning more fuel per mile than even the thirstiest pickup trucks or sports cars.

Was just thinking the same thing; have a state drivers license and a private pilot cert with an IFR rating.

I'm currently in the process of hiring someone for a startup. Long story short I got the requirements document that was partially written by an in-house recruiter who basically thought "you're building a Java back-end, so here are all the buzzwords this entails."

So I got a document that said that it required Java, Swing, JAX-RPC, AJAX, XML-RPC, Java Server Faces, Struts, Hibernate, ESB, and about a half-dozen other vaguely related technologies.

*sigh*

Given that I'm the hiring manager I asked if we could revise the list. And I narrowed it down to:

Required: Java experience.

Nice to have: Server-side development experience, experience with Eclipse, experience with JDBC, experience with JSON.

'Cause we're not using any of the other crap that was in the recruiter-supplied bullet list.

(P.S.: We don't have funding now so don't contact me privately about this job. Not quite yet...)

(Worked at home for 9 years about a decade ago, and recently started working at home again, and has parents who worked at home for nearly two decades.) Absolutely! I would highly recommend getting out of the house in the morning and in the evening, at the very least; in the morning it helps organize your thoughts and in the afternoon or evening it helps organize your thoughts. And getting out helps with the "cabin fever" as well.

All military equipment is subject to the laws of economics: each piece of equipment, from guns to tanks to aircraft carriers are subject to tradeoffs between weight, power, size, affordability and lethality--which is why, for example, the U.S. has a variety of different sized ships with different functions, rather than just floating a few thousand general-purpose aircraft-carrier sized ships that do everything.

So when envisioning space war, it's going to be the same sort of tradeoffs dictated by economics and by physics: very large, heavy and well shielded (read: very think bulkheads with lots of iron) ships that serve as carrier vessels and the like, surrounded by a periphery of smaller ships which serve as a sort of "forward guard" to the heavy capital ships, in much the same way that a U.S. aircraft carrier sails with a whole bunch of support ships.

Further, because blowing something up will always be easier than guarding something, the things that will deliver bombs (small airplanes) will always be smaller, lighter and more maneuverable than their (much much much) bigger targets. That's especially true in space, where you don't need to run your thrusters continuously, but can just be carried along by momentum. And because life support is going to be very expensive (since you have to carry everything with you, not just food and power, but air as well), and (assuming there is no artificial gravity) only the large capital ships will be able to spin like a top to simulate gravity, most of the smallest ships will be cheap drones. (In fact, I could envision a world where only the largest capital ships carry people, mostly marines, for when you actually have to put boots on the ground.)

Beyond that, most materiel has developed over the years in response to new defensive or offensive challenges. Star-configuration castles where developed in response to heavier artillery; aircraft carriers developed when timeliness and range prevented putting planes over foreign territory. In space, I would expect a lot of emphasis on electronic and optical surveillance (especially on the forward facing ships in the outer perimeter of the protective zone around a capital ship), along with laser-based inter-ship communications (to reduce the EM footprint), and I would expect a constant rotation of larger "battleship" like ships (smaller and more nimble than the capital ships, mostly rigged with a lot of bombs) to the main capital ship, so that the crew can go back to simulated gravity on a regular basis. I would also expect high-powered lasers, very powerful railguns and other measures to throw fragments into the air in order to protect capital ships against attack.

On vacation on the other side of the country visiting my in-laws, thus around 10.5% of the circumference of the Earth from where I was born. My wife? 1%...

They guy may be wrong, but he's probably less wrong than the pointy haired boss in the corner office at some random large non-tech corporation.

And that's the key: the MBAs are groping in the dark barely able to find their own ass. One happened to grope his way slightly closer to the light. Give him kudos for that.