No matter how expensive a home sim you make, it won’t ever get be even a quarter of what an actual entry amateur plane costs to buy and maintain. It’s not even the plane itself either, it’s all the recurring costs like storage, maintenance, spare parts, fuel, certification fees, taxes, etc. The only cheap flight option for a recreational pilot is bushcraft light planes. And they will still cost more than the sim setup, while you’ll only be able to fly it on certain places, during certain weather, at certain times of the year. The rest of the time you’ll still have to pay all the storage and maintenance fees. Planes are incredibly expensive.
Yes and no. I bought a property with a double wide and a 5000 square foot hangar on it located on a private strip. The rent from the double wide and the other hangar spots I rent pays the mortgage and all the expenses related to the property. I own a j3 cub that I have about 30k into that I fly daily in Florida and maintain it myself for practically nothing. Affordable aviation is possible but you have to be very smart about how you go about doing it, and a good bit of luck is involved to get the right deals by being in the right place at the right time.
Oh sure, just go buy a big enough property to have a hanger and a private landing strip on it. Cheap and easy!
If you’re ok with living in the middle of nowhere, then it’s entirely doable. Some folks just have different priorities.
For instance, here is a property in Yucca Valley, CA that has a hanger in the backyard, where you can head out right on the runway from your yard. Just under $300k. There’s an entire street of houses that are adjacent to the runway of a small municipal airstrip, I think they call them fly in/fly out communities. They’re often well off the beaten path, but you don’t have to pay for storage when you have a hanger out back.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/57544-Sunnyslope-Dr-Yucca-Valley-CA-92284/17496243_zpid/
You have to have the kind of life and professional occupation which is compatible with living in such a place.
Not many people have or are willing to change their lives in order to be able to fly regularly on a real plane like that. It’s like people who chose to live on a boat and sail around the World (doable, if you adjust your whole life to it and have the skill to work in the kind of occupation compatible with it).
Meanwhile a setup like the one on the picture is a lot easier to work into one’s life, even living in appartment in the middle of a city and with a 9-to-5 regular Joe job.
Yea I’m in FL in a small town. If you want to live in a big city aircraft ownership is on a whole different level of cost.
Never said it was easy, but I have less than 60k of my cash into everything, including a property that generates me money back. You gotta work for what you want. It’s not like I just inherited the capital to do this. I worked for it. And now I have something that will not only pay for itself but pay me as well. But go ahead and just try to hold yourself down with that thought process if you want.
Yes, but I bet that if you break down the accounting it would still be several times the cost of the setup on the photo. Home sims typically don’t carry an additional mortgage payment or a lifestyle commitment.
You would be surprised how much that setup would cost. Could easily be 30k in equipment there.
That setup is not 30k, I know because I’m a sim hobbyist. Maybe if it had a surround canopy or a motion chair, maybe, and it’s just maybe, it will start approaching 10k. Most people consider motion to be secondary and unnecessary for commercial flight simulation, and people are increasingly preferring VR over modular panels. Sim still doesn’t require uprooting your life to live in the middle of nowhere, switching careers, and going into debt to buy property and risk financial ruin with a fickle investment. It’s ok, some people are fine flying sim because they never would get to fly an Airbus IRL and wouldn’t want a job as a airline pilot to get to do it, they just want to play pretend, and that’s fine.
That’s not even counting the not small chunk of people who are actually commercial pilots who also build sim rigs in their homes.
None of the stuff applies to owning an aircraft in my case either. I’m still where I grew up. I never switched careers, and how is it a fickle investment where I’m literally cash positive on the whole thing, building equity in something that will be worth a ton in the future… you think investments are risk free or something?
Ok so buy a house next to a strip with your own hangar and become an airplane mechanic. How come I never thought of this?
If you’re truly passionate about flying and owning aircraft then you do what you have to do to make it happen, that’s what I did anyways. Exactly that. And I have less than 60k of investment in everything. The property generates profit now.
Fair enough, and I respect the commitment and that you share how you made it work. Without going ‘all-in’, having our own plane is a dream that’ll never go through…
(But I can imagine that even with the same commitment a lot of people wouldn’t have the opportunity to copy it - money is one thing but available property is another)
Agreed, a bit of luck is absolutely necessary.
Plus I’m afraid of heights.
There’s heights and there heights. The common fear is of heights that are large enough for a fall to cause serious injury, and not too large to be out of range for biological fall protection
I used to be afraid of heights, but trained myself out of it as an adult. I had trouble abseiling, walking on elevated walkways, standing near windows in tall buildings
Three things I never had a height problem with:
- Front seat of a plane (or any other seat, for that matter)
- Basket of a balloon
- On top of a tall hill
I have some fear of heights and for some reason it doesn’t get triggered when flying on a plane, even on a prop-plane a km or two above the ground.
High up in tall buildings or mountain or coastal cliffs, sure, planes, not at all.
It’s not exactly rational.
If you’re not actually afraid of flying when on a commercial flight, I bet you won’t either when at the commands of a poky prop-plane.
I looked into getting a pilots license and a plane once thinking maybe it would be more fun than flying commercial.
The license to fly just a dinky Cessna would be expensive af and I would only be able to afford a Cessna from 1982 or some shit anyway AND they only have a range of like 300 miles or some shit.
To actually go anywhere beyond my state I’d need a private jet license which is even more expensive takes a while and WAY outside of affordability.
Ah well guess I’m stuck driving or flying commercial
I fucking love the dedication people put into their sin rigs. Their joy makes me so happy, even more so when it’s related to their real work. This guy is a trucker and recreated his entire cabin for his American Trucker sim. He’s my fucking hero: https://youtube.com/shorts/EmpAJR5lNuQ?si=Z324Z-M_pGG_9Bp-
Wet rental?
Wet lease? Yeah, clubs and leasing are an accessible option but depends on what you want to do. Flying a tiny 182 Cessna, sure will be as much as a nice Sim setup. For one flight, at $200 an hour, roughly 25 hours of flight or thereabouts and you’re already over the price of the simulator.
Fly commercial jets, like the one this picture is simulating? No way. A small Citation jet starts at $50k a month. That’s probably already 5 times the cost of equipment in that photo. And you can fly the big birds and do crazy stuff with them in the sim.
Indeed.
Back when I was making extra good money I got some flying lessons and started dreaming about it and eventually figured out the costs (bad enough the upfront ones, way worse the running costs) for a shitty-shit plane that wasn’t even exciting to fly.
Also the physical setup in the picture looks like it’s emulating large commercial passenger planes (don’t really know enough to guess which, though) and those planes cost millions of dollars.
All that hardware and then just… a chair.
Not to mention the Ikea table.
And only one monitor too. Would have expected 3-4 to give a better view.
VR headset would be best view but then they couldn’t see all the fancy controls around them.
Even better if they could do it with AR. Then they could blend the controls with the view.
I love ar in flight sims, moving your head to move the camera view across the huge amount of instruments is so nice when youve got hands on the stick and throtle and both feet in the rudder pedals.
No neon trim and no cup holder even. Probably the kind of guy that wants to fight you if you call a flight Sim a game.
Most people mention the costs of owning aircraft vs a sim, but there’s another possible reason: health. People come in different shapes and forms and not everyone who loves aviation is able to get II or even III medical class. So flight simulation is their only option to be a “pilot”.
I mean, on VATSIM (popular aviation simulation network) there’s a group of visually impaired people who have made a special interface so they can fly an aircraft even though they can’t see!
Simulation (of any kind) gives many people what they can’t get in any other way. And as with any other hobby, as long as it’s not damaging to other aspects of your life, let people enjoy what they want
Wait, that’s super fucking cool. Do you have a link to the way they’re able to fly blind?
Oh God damnit. You got me. I busted up laughing.
I needed a giggle at work happy to do it.
But for real there’s a bunch of stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TecHPonwJxQ
To go along with this is also risk to one’s health and potentially death.
53 per 100,000 pilots was the death rate amongst pilots in 2018 according to The University of Delaware .
This doesn’t sound like a lot, until you consider it was the #2 most dangerous occupation in the US that year.
Behind #1 Loggers (111 per 100k) and ahead of #22 Police Officers (14 per 100k).
So it’s one thing to have a flight sim rig and at worst fall off your chair. A whole another thing to potentially make a mistake in an actual plane and pay the price with your life.
The double-standard on display here is just disgusting. Sure, it’s perfectly fine to modify your home entertainment system into a fake airplane but I try a little remodeling to make work feel more like home and it’s all “security will escort you off the premises” and “we’re taking away your pilot’s license”. Boils my blood.
AITA for asking my wife to respect my title a pilot?
I need the opinions of avgeeks and pilots on a matter involving my wife. I AM COMPLETELY SERIOUS AND I NEED HELP. /srs
My wife and I (together for 5 years, married for 2, no kids) have an amazing, happy relationship. I can’t recall a single time we’ve ever argued to the point of a breakup or divorce. This issue, however, is causing me to reconsider the health of our relationship. Since my wife and I have been together, I have worked as a manager for a restaurant chain. I am an extremely passionate aviation enthusiast in my free time. I have spent thousands of dollars on flight textbooks, sim gear, and even built my own a330 setup. I have never actually flown a plane or started flight training, but I have considered it for a long time. Even though my skills are not a career, I still consider myself as adept or possibly more knowledgeable than the average pilot.
That being said, here’s where the problem arises. My wife and I were invited to one of her male coworkers house for a barbecue. My wife is a senior software tech for a Covid startup. She’s worked there since 2020, a lucky catch after she was laid off from her previous job due to the virus. It was my first time meeting many of her now-close coworkers due to Covid and working from home. I had assumed she’d talked about me before, but as we were cycling through introductions I became less sure. We make our way down the line to the host of the party, a new male hire that she has grown platonically close with. We exchange casual conversation and Greg (host) asked what I do for a living. My wife chimes in with “He manages a [insert fast food chain], it certainly comes with some benefits (I’m assuming she’s referring to free food)”, in a voice that implied nothing was wrong with what she said. I very quickly corrected her and told him that I am a pilot. My wife already knows how insecure I am about my job and how I’d much rather be introduced by my hobby. I’ve earned the title of pilot through my 500+ hours on and sim and thousands of dollars put into my craft. I think it is incredibly disrespectful for her not to acknowledge my skills and training. Just because I don’t have the title of pilot on an overpriced piece of paper doesn’t mean I’m not a pilot.
I laughed it off with Greg, told him under my breath that my wife was often forgetful (which I’m sure he’s realized just from working with her). He seemed to brush it off casually. At this point, I’m fuming, but I don’t go much farther than exchanging some nasty glances at my wife for the rest of the night. As we pack into the car to leave, the argument starts. She feels as if I don’t deserve my title as a Pilot because I’m not professional. I told her she is completely insensitive to the work i’ve done and she will never understand what it’s like to study so much. She’s currently on the couch as I type this. Am I really the asshole for asking to be respected?
Lmao how fucking niche but relevant
I just looked it up, FAA would require 1500 hours flight time, only 50 of which can be sim time, so this copypasta character is stupid both if you know and if you don’t know.
That’s just a mid-range setup. The real simmers have at least 3 monitors.
Real simmers have a VR headset and one of those human gyroscope things that spins on 3 axes.
You mean a head?
No a penis.
Monitors are probably the cheapest part of a flight sim setup too
Man, at some point it might be cheaper to buy a plane.
A plane. A cheap, 2-4 seat prop plane. A full sim rig can fly ANY PLANE and spaceships too!
I am not in any way a sim gamer of any of these sorts. My inputs are keyboard, mouse, or controller. And I suck at everything I play, and I try to limit my gaming time (and expenditures on gaming).
But I kind of get it, you know?
I would love to work on a project to build a thing that could reconfigure itself to match any existing cockpit. That would be sick. Maybe like a bunch of self-arranging robot building blocks and each has a different kind of switch or dial. Or each one can simulate it, hopefully in 3D with force feedback. They crawl into position and lock arms to form the cockpit. Send a command and the F-16 rearranges itself into an airbus 380. Or a corvette.
I see you dying in an accident testing the g-force simulator you built. 😁
Do a Magneto and target the iron in people’s blood. A little electromagnetic field play, and suddenly your body “weighs” 8 times the normal amount.
That or manipulate the inner ear fluid somehow.
But I feel like the sense of really flying and being able to go places would be far more rewarding. Even if it is just a prop plane.
You’re probably one of these people who likes to go outside instead of playing localcarsimulator 4000
A real plane would be most definitely satisfying in its own way, but Sim planes let you perform crazy maneuvers, fly places you wouldn’t be allowed to in real life, and fly aircraft that you would never even get a chance to see. Not to mention, the whole threat of death with real life flying.
Really good points that you bring up. I can agree with you fully now. Especially on the point of being able to do crazy tricks at no threat to your own real safety.
Yeah but I won’t die in a sim rig unless that panel falls and crushes me to death
Do you know how much it costs to annual a Cessna 172? You could build 3 of these rigs a year for what the aviation equivalent of a 1988 Toyota Camry costs to maintain and fuel.
This. A full sim rig still costs a lot less than an actual plane, plus it runs on electricity and not leaded petrol so it won’t send you loopy at 60.
For what it’s worth, avgas is going lead free, and there’s already unleaded options.
I’d say good chance this guy does have a plane.
I’d put money that he has at least a small plane. I work in the motorcycle industry and there’s a large overlap between pilots and motorcycle riders for some reason. Quite a few private pilots have pretty well set up flight sim rigs at home. Not to this extreme, but most have the basics for running MS Flight Simulator
“pilots and motorcycle riders for some reason”
The suicide drive is strong. Also, I blame top gun.
I work in the motorcycle industry and there’s a large overlap between pilots and motorcycle riders for some reason.
I got a single neighbor who has two different cars, a bunch of e-scooters, and builds different e-bikes constantly in his garage. Some people are just enthusiastic about modes of transportation I think…
Pilots and sports car owners too. Tbh I think pilots just like to go fast, on the air or on the ground
So they can fly the planes they want
The FAA and similar entities won’t let pilots do all the fun and crazy shit they want to do that they can do in sim games.
Try buzzing a neighborhood in your plane, watch how fast you lose your pilots license, much safer doing this stuff in a sim.
Planes are expensive AF to maintain
After Gran Turismo came out, the local computer store put up a rig. It was over 7K. Holy crap.
I bet this cost more than that.
Imagine what a real car costs
I once bought a more or less running car for $50.
For that price, I’m gonna go with “more running.” As in, “I’ve been doing more running because my car doesn’t work.”
It was able to get onto the trailer under it’s own power, and I drove it to work the following Monday… it needed a water pump to be “driveable” but I ended up doing a few other things to the car. It was an old Geo Metro and I wanted one to tinker with. I spent about $600 getting the car like I wanted it.
For $50 running is how you move it.
We’ve spent 45k over 3 years between 4 people racing a fucking Saturn station wagon. Vast majority in travel and maintaining the $500 car. Goes up from there homie lol
New or used?
I just download my cars.
You wouldn’t!
Why so few monitors??
Lol first thing I thought of, 4/10, cool control panels, but not even a large curved display
Someone posts something kinda cool.
Doofuses of the internet: we must find all the faults to prove how much smarter we are
This is probably a work in progress. And this person may not have the same preferences and priorities as you for their own personal setup.
Chair isn’t even articulated, 6/10 tops, I wonder if he even has force feedback.
https://thewarthogproject.com/
It’s amazing.
That’s wild! At that point is the hobby flying or building/designing sim cockpits?
TBH, I think you’re right about it and the building is the part they really find fun.
Indeed they are… (picture 14)
