Ooooof indeed. When my friend the check and training captain did his hour building in the late 80s, he chose a 152 over a 172 because it was $14 instead of $17 per hour...

SunState Aviation in Kissimmee does (or at least did last time I checked) a 15k fixed price private in two weeks. This means seven days a week with a dedicated instructor. If you aren't in such a hurry the price goes down quite a bit.

It is a difference of "tradition", if you will. In the US training is cheaper than in, say, Western Europe, so people still go the independent route.

That's a US rule, not an international rule.

500 is certainly not a huge amount. However you have to look beyond mere hours. A lot depends on the training and the flying. I'll take a 500-hour pilot who is serious about flying, has had good instructions and is used to operating in busy airspace over a 5000-hour pilot with an aw-shucks attitude who spends all his…

Meet the "Little John" portable urinal.

It depends what you mean by fully certified. This guy isn't old enough for an Airliner Transport Pilot License, not does he need a type rating for a Bonanza.

Hell yeah we still do web forums. The airliners.net tech_ops forum is basically porn for commercial airliner enthusiasts.

Airliners can maneuver much more aggressively than what most people realize. Sadly, against a Mach 3 missile which doesn't even have to hit directly to be effective, I don't think that would help very much.

Countermeasures are expensive and nowhere near 100% effective.

It may also comfort you to know that pilots, especially airline pilots, tend to be somewhat anal retentive, detail oriented and obsessive-compulsive. It's sort of an occupational hazard and much reinforced in training. Checklists and procedures, done exactly the same way every time, are what keep us alive, even at my…

I'll add system maintenance and pilot training to the cost breakdown.

You said it. I've done FL to MA (and back) with two stops in a Cessna 172. About eleven hours flying time each way. My legs were aching rather badly. Can't imagine sitting in the pilot seat for 14 hours straight.

His first flight lesson was less than three years ago, and received his private pilot certificate on his 17th birthday.

Great article. I just have a couple of nomenclature nitpicks.

And yeah, if you have an ASUS motherboard, you'll get a nifty little Q-connector that lets you connect everything outside of the case. Good for you. That must be super great. The rest of us will be over here, squinting and biting our tongues, pushing and praying.

The trick is to route the smaller ones between the motherboard and the motherboard back plate. Finicky but it gets a lot of cables out of the way. Make the plugs pop out from behind the motherboard right beside their sockets.

For the thicker ones, use patience and zip-ties while channeling your inner pedant.

After 20+ years of PC building, this is not a problem for me anymore. You always get spares of all the fiddly bits except maybe large thumbscrews. I have a little plastic case with compartments that contains more than I need of pretty much any screw type necessary for PC building.

For a moment I thought, "ads"? I never see those. My ad blocker takes care of them. Makes browsing way faster too.