...

As someone who has commuted weekly for a couple decades in a Lancair, I would suggest global entry. Your desired flights are ambitious even for someone with experience.

Right off the bat your statement of "Runway to runway is 900 NM, so 1,000 seems reasonable to cover the distance without having to make an intermediate stop" catches my attention. 100nm cushion likely lacks the fuel reserves for IFR, quite possibly VFR, and most certainly my own personal reserves after cutting it close one winter at midnight flying home into a headwind.
 
"altitude capability"..................
 
My bladder and needing to stretch range is about 650 miles...or 4 hours. Whatever comes first.

Also, including the Baron seems a bit odd. What would insurance be for a low time pilot if it's even attainable?
 
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StraightnLevel said:
IFR/Weather capability. FIKI cert would be nice, some sort of de-ice is probably a firm requirement.
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Remember there’s a difference between “IFR” and “all-weather” capability, and it’s a BIG difference for the small planes you’re considering.

Let me suggest that you evaluate the weather over that route every day for a couple of months and see what percent of the time you could actually do the flight. Discuss your hypothetical go/no-go decisions with your CFI. I suspect you’ll find a small plane isn’t going to be as dependable a means of transportation as you hope. At the least, it will give you some data to decide what capability you will need.
 
See post #2.

It’s infeasible week-to-week because of certain weather that is simply unflyable in the kind of equipment that you’re proposing. You’re going to miss business meetings or family events or you’re going to come to grief trying to make it (or your family and friends will).

Sorry to be so brutal. It’s not something you have to believe a guy on the internet like me, but it will become more clear as you progress in certificates, endorsements, hours, and near-misses.

However, keep aiming high as you are. Maybe you have more money in the future, more financial success, and can afford more plane (or even a pilot) in the not too distant future.
 
Racerx said:
My bladder and needing to stretch range is about 650 miles...or 4 hours. Whatever comes first.

Also, including the Baron seems a bit odd. What would insurance be for a low time pilot if it's even attainable?
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A large mouth bottle fixes one of those. Fatigue sets in around the 3 hour mark where I need to have feet on the ground for a few minutes.
 
455 Bravo Uniform said:
A large mouth bottle fixes one of those. Fatigue sets in around the 3 hour mark where I need to have feet on the ground for a few minutes.
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I don't have the precision necessary to control the firehose. I've got a bottle if I absolutely must.
 
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StraightnLevel said:
Driving I'm good for as much as 5-6, which is about a full tank anyway.

I put the Baron on the list just because it's possible to acquire under $250K, and certainly has the range. I'm not sure about a twin, though, for a variety of reasons which are probably obvious. Thanks for pointing out the likely insurance feasibility (or lack thereof).
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Operational cost of twins are substantially higher than for comparable singles. Learjets can be had for cheap these days. But....
 
StraightnLevel said:
Ummm....yeah.....not even close, I'm afraid. I'm aiming high, but not THAT high.

I'd prefer to pay cash, or as close to it as possible, which means $200-250K for an "experienced" model, assuming no major work needed to get it airworthy. That also generally cuts out "projects" that don't have a current annual.

It's a stretch, I know.
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For any used airplane you buy, best factor in 10% of the purchase price for maintenance and fixing what the previous owner neglected. So for a $250,000 airplane you will need an additional $25,000 available.

Insurance will be breathtaking for a low time pilot. Also factor in the planes you are looking at are sub 200 knots, making your trip no wind at 4.5 to 5 hours each way. And we know it's rare to have zero wind, so those times will increase as will fuel burn and time enroute.

Then you have weather. There will be days of convective weather you won't be able to go, as well as icing. And those two conditions are not for a low time pilot to venture into.

In the beginning it will be exciting to make the trip. But 4 to 6 hours of flying is fatiguing, even more so in weather.

TSA sucks for sure. But being able to sit back and relax, or even nap in a ride above the weather and running on a schedule, plus doing the trip in under two hours or so? I know my choice.
 
...and Global Entry does mitigate much of the TSA hassle.

I spent the last few years of my career traveling between Orlando and Dallas twice a month, with occasional visits to other sites in between. As much as I hate airlines, it was tolerable with Global Entry and preferred seat selection. Maintaining a schedule would have been impossible were I trying to use a small personal plane.
 
Mooneys don’t require that much more maintenance than any other plane you are looking at. Turbos (M20K) and gear maintenance require a little more but generally it can be scheduled as part of your annual.
If you don’t need a turbo, I would recommend a J. Are you going to be flying above 12000’ regularly? Although Js with deicing capability are rare. I would consider an Ovation or Bravo (turbo Lycoming), but they are more expensive.
No matter what you fly, expect more maintenance the first year.
 
StraightnLevel said:
In reality what has been happening is that I end up leaving the office at 4, drive across Houston to IAH, take off at 6-7, short layover in Dallas/ATL/MSP/DET, then get in to MKE at midnight, then another 45 minutes to finally get to a bed.
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In reality, this is earlier than you’ll get home if you fly yourself. Fatigue is probably going to be a more consistent problem than weather.
 
StraightnLevel said:
I end up leaving the office at 4, drive across Houston to IAH, take off at 6-7, short layover in Dallas/ATL/MSP/DET, then get in to MKE at midnight, then another 45 minutes to finally get to a bed.
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Instead, with your own 170 knot plane, you'll leave the office at 4, drive to the airport, preflight your plane and get it out of the hangar, get a weather briefing, file a flight plan, and with luck you'll be airborne by 5:00 to 5:30. You'll spend 6 hours (or more) in the air, land at MKE at 11:00 (or later), get the plane tied down and pick up a rental car, then be at the hotel and in bed around 12:00 or 12:30. Later, if the winds aren't favorable or if you have to fly around some weather.

Bear in mind that night flight is riskier than flying during the day, that you will have already put in a full day at the office, and that flying itself is tiring.

Doesn't seem to me like the game is worth the candle.

StraightnLevel said:
...taking control of my commute timeline is the single most viable excuse I have come up with to explain to my wife why I need a plane.
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Unless your wife is incapable of basic arithmetic and can't read a clock, I think you'll need to find a different argument. (Try increasing your life insurance; she might encourage you to take up any number of risky activities. ;) )

Airplane ownership very seldom makes any more economic sense than getting married or having kids. Personal aircraft are bought to give us pleasure or to get us to places we couldn't otherwise reach, and those reasons have associated costs.
 
StraightnLevel said:
1- or 2-person XC travel from Houston to SE Wisconsin? I'm a dual resident, working on PPL, and want an option for my commute that doesn't involve TSA every....single.....week. Parameters are:

> Range. Runway to runway is 900 NM, so 1,000 seems reasonable to cover the distance without having to make an intermediate stop.
> Speed. Don't need a speed demon, necessarily, but don't want to be trundling along at 140 knots, either. Altitude capability helps, obviously.
> IFR/Weather capability. FIKI cert would be nice, some sort of de-ice is probably a firm requirement.
> Reliability/maintainability. I'm more interested in flying than wrenching, so not really looking for something that's in the shop more than in the air.
> Needs to be within BasicMed limits for future-proofing, so no 8-seat corporate re-treads.

The list I have so far is:

1) Cirrus SR22/SR22T. Expensive, but parts and maintenance should not be a problem. There are local rentals available for "fly-before-buy", too. G1 and G2 prices are becoming more reasonable.....
2) Beech Baron 58/58P . Less expensive to buy than the Cirrus, probably more expensive to own. Looks well-suited to the task, but my price range limits me to older examples.
3) Mooney M20, K version or later (or Acclaim). Looks like a good fit, but is it really suited for XC flying? How maintainable are they when you get out into the rural GA airports?
4) Diamond DA40. These look expensive for anything that hasn't been beaten to death or needs an engine. Am I missing something?
5) Bonanza with tip tanks. A friend of mine is selling his V-tail for less than $100K. A few more $$$ into avionics and interior upgrades would make it a decent deal....???

Thoughts on these? Are there any in this category that I have missed?
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How much time have you spent in a small general aviation aircraft? Legs of 4+ hours can be quite uncomfortable.
 
StraightnLevel said:
Thanks for the response.

My assumption (perhaps incorrect) is that the ranges quoted generally assume a 45-minute reserve, correct? So, my thinking is 45 minute reserve plus another 10%. I should have been more clear in my initial statement.
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I think that most quoted ranges for small aircraft are, like the quoted cruise speed and number of passengers, more aspirational than real, and also omit reserves.

Don't listen to the naysayers too much. If you are flexible and patient, you can fly that route in a small plane without an instrument rating. More ratings and more equipment give you both more options but also more responsibility to decide when to stay on the ground, and nothing at all will get you a 100% dispatch rate.

My longest single leg by miles is 860 nm, which is basically the same as your Houston to Milwaukee run. This is much better done with a stop in anything that burns avgas and isn't pressurized. It is long enough to start mattering how fast you go, though, unlike shorter trips like 200 miles. In a Cherokee at 105 knots, you're looking at 4 x 2 = 8 hours plus the preflight, fuel stop, and post-flight time on the ground. And headwinds will be murderous as a percentage of your speed. In an Arrow at 130 knots, it goes down to 3.3 x 2 = 6.6 hours in the air, which is much more doable but still a long day. Get into a Bonanza or Cirrus that can cruise at 170+ and it's 2.5 x 2 = 5 hours. Equipped with in-cockpit weather information and a decent autopilot and flown in VMC, that's not so bad.

You will end up spending the night somewhere in the middle of the country. You will end up canceling some trips and either going commercial or staying where you are. You will sometimes hate owning an airplane. But if your dream is to fly and this is a mission you can afford to do, in both dollars and flexibility, then get out there and live your dream. You're not getting any younger.
 
Lndwarrior said:
Get one of the higher performance Van's RVs. You should be able to get a 200 mph plane, well built, with great avionics for your budget.
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The problem comes in at night when clouds are hard to see and easily blundered into. How many months out of the year is the temp at cruise altitude below freezing?
 
iamtheari said:
If you are flexible and patient, you can fly that route in a small plane without an instrument rating.
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Sure. If you're patient enough you can walk the trip. But he's talking about business, where he leaves work at 4pm and wants to be in his hotel later that same night. That's a bit different than casual recreational travel where you can afford an unplanned overnight.

Get-there-itis has killed way too many pilots.
 
Racerx said:
For 2 people?
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It's a bit slower than a Cirrus, but the prices are cheaper, it's fairly stable, flies a lot like a Cherokee, useful for more than just the cross-countries. I used to fly with a student who had one and it was a pretty good ship for flying from Central Texas to Kansas and back in a day.
 
Half Fast said:
Sure. If you're patient enough you can walk the trip. But he's talking about business, where he leaves work at 4pm and wants to be in his hotel later that same night. That's a bit different than casual recreational travel where you can afford an unplanned overnight.

Get-there-itis has killed way too many pilots.
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Hence the flexibility side of the equation. We don't know how strict his work and home schedules are. It does have some of the ingredients of a case of terminal get-there-itis, but not all of them. That being said, adding the missing ingredients isn't a stretch.
 
StraightnLevel said:
My schedule varies in criticality. With a farm in Wisconsin and company HQ in Houston, I'm back and forth a lot, sometimes with very precise schedule, sometimes not.

Example 1: Next week I fly from Houston to North Carolina, meet my wife and kid (in college), then drive to Wisconsin, then fly back to Houston Jan 1. No real time crunches there, so no pressure not to wait to the next day, or bail and grab a ticket on the next A320. This trip would be great in something like a SR22T; 5-6 hours in a plane beats 12 in a car, and commercial flights between Dec 22 and Jan 1 are incredibly unreliable.
Example 2: In a couple of weeks I fly up to Wisconsin, where I'm in for a day handling farm business, then catching a flight to the UK, back to Wisconsin for more work, then back to HQ. I have some flexibility, but not a lot because of the international leg.
Example 3: In February I have at least 9 flight legs scheduled, more possible. Zero flexibility for about 3 weeks straight, so that would all be Delta or American, so that I have someone else to blame if the itinerary busts. No way would I try to do all of this in a small plane - just too much risk of blowing the schedule.
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Between your initial post with the travel specs and this one, I think commercial travel is your friend. Sounds like you're an in-demand person running a tight-ship.

I agree with the commenter above who remarked about the danger of putting in a full workday and then heading to the airport to fly 900nm in a piston plane. Commercial travel might be obnoxious with its logistical hurdles, but the cost of doing that fatigued and annoyed is effectively nothing. The cost of hopping into your own plane at the end of a workday for a long night XC is potentially significant, even assuming excellent weather.

But if you're committed to flying for your commute then I'd buy the fastest possible plane I could... A Lancair IV, Columbia 400 or SR22T come to mind. Then again if you're still in PPL training you might want to lob a call into some insurance companies and see how feasible this plan is. It may be quite some time before you're able to get coverage on any of the high performance monsters that will make this trip easier. I don't want to know what insurance cos will charge if you're fresh out of training trying to get SR22T, PA46, Baron 58P, Lancair IV, etc . It could be a mind-boggling figure that comes out to 20+ commercial tickets per year in insurance policy costs alone lol.

EDIT:
For reference, trying at 600TT 550complex to hop into a Twin Turbo Comanche was nearly 10k$/yr. And that's a 200k hull covg. If you're at 50 TT hopping into a Baron? A lot more is my guess. You can upgrade to 1st class on a lot of your travel legs for that price!
 
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StraightnLevel said:
More uncomfortable than 5 hours crammed into a Delta center seat between two large individuals?
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Yeah. With Delta you can get up and pee. You can take a nap. With Delta, the airplane will always be capable of managing the weather.

No way I'm signing up for 1,000 miles, largely at night, all year around for that route if dispatch and arrival reliability are important.
 
StraightnLevel said:
More uncomfortable than 5 hours crammed into a Delta center seat between two large individuals?
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A 900 NM flight isn't five hours in an airliner.

For this mission, I'd take the airliner. The climate control is much better, and you're flying over the weather, or diverting around it.

There's a reason that I asked how much time you've spent in a light GA plane is that I don't thing anyone who has many hours would ask about flying that mission, because it's impractical. If you wanted to do it occasionally, and had flexible scheduling, by all means go for it, but to do this on a regular basis is going to be extremely difficult. I didn't fly all that many hours in powered planes, and one of the reasons I stopped was that the airplanes I could afford to fly didn't provide much in transportation utility.

One thing you also didn't consider are headwinds. Let's going from Houston to Wisconsin today. Did you check the winds aloft?

Winds and Temperatures Aloft St Louis MO

Offering a Temperature Map for the United States
www.usairnet.com www.usairnet.com

At 9,000 feet, they are showing out of the northwest at 75 mph. Assuming you're in a Cirrus SR22, heading 030, you're ground speed is now 135 knots. That's now close to 7 hours at cruise plus two climbs and descents, so you're now looking at 8 or 9 hours airport to airport. That airliner seat is looking a lot more inviting.
 
You're going to hate this response, but I'm going to say it anyway. Restructure your life to avoid wasting so much of it in business travel. The response to that is an immediate "I can't", but that's incorrect. In 1 second you could fall and bounce your head off the ground, unable to travel and you'd have to sort out a way to be productive being in one place. Your schedule as described is as busy as Henry Kissinger when when he was flying around making wars worse...and whatever you're doing isn't that important.

Delegate way more, tell way more people 'no', and let people know that telecommuting works for most anything. Life is way too short to spend on running errands.

If you want to fly GA, fly for fun. That's a better reason than you've described it for business...and in the grand scheme of things better for you and whomever you're around.

Just my 2 cents...
 
That 45 minute reserve thing, for ifr that means that you have to plan 45 minute reserve at your alternate. You won't be able to do a trip like that reliably vfr. You'll probably still be on the airliner. Ifr will buy you more trips, but still, there will be days you'll have to postpone or cancel. I just picked up a Bravo which would probably be a good fit for a solo pilot doing this trip. But mind the useful load in the Bravo if you look at them.
 
The PA46 was made for this sort of trip. But even with something like that, which is a far better choice than most of the other suggestions so far (IMO), there are concessions that are going to have to be made. It's always fun to think about how much utility you'll get out of having your own airplane and commuting here and there in it but the reality is that there will always be times where it isn't going to work.

I have two residences with obligations at both locations as well, but a much shorter commute. I also own an airplane and use it to travel between the two locations, when it is practical. The times that I consider it to be practical is when my schedule is somewhat flexible, in the event that I need to leave either place sooner or later than originally planned on, and/or the weather looks predictable enough that there isn't a concern. When I absolutely need to be in one place or the other at a specific time, I drive.

Perhaps you should charter a few flights in an aircraft similar to what you're looking at before taking the next step. See what you think of a TX to WI ride. It's possible that one or two trips will do you in.
 
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