6.5 KiB
I'm a ~700-hour instrument-rated private pilot. I have previously owned a 2020 Diamond DA40-NG (N297LA, "Lemur"), and a 2021 PA-46 Piper M350 (N383WA, "Whiskers"). One day I'll fly a turboprop... one day...
My story
In 2012, while visiting home from college for the holidays, I asked my parents for my gift to be a "discovery flight" at nearby KBDR (Bridgeport Memorial Airport, in Stratford, CT --just across the Housatonic River from us).
In case you're not familiar, this is where a flight instructor will take you up in the air for an hour or so in a tiny single-engine piston aircraft. They handle takeoff and landing, but once you're in the air, they'll let you take the controls and fly around a bit. And for a certain type of person (me), even more exciting than steering the plane around a bit was everything else: figuring out what all the gauges mean, how the engine worked, understanding all the incredible, delicate-yet-overengineered marvels that made flying possible. And, I'll say, the smell of a dusty old 1970s trainer aircraft mixed with almost-but-not-quite-lead-free aviation gas simply can't be beat.
I was hooked. When we landed, the instructor told me that if I wanted, I could grab a logbook from the front desk, and if I logged this flight, I'd be 1/40 of the way to earning my private pilot's license. (Yeah, you only need 40 hours, though that's more than it might sound like). This, of course, was genius customer acquisition. I snagged the logbook and also signed up for a few more sessions while I was home for break.
I returned to Tufts a few weeks later and already had almost ten hours logged. Naturally, I set about finding a way to complete my training. Being a second-semester senior, and apparently not interested in availing myself of the many opportunities on campus, I crafted my schedule to be entirely afternoon classes, and would spend most mornings taking flying lessons at East Coast Aero Club, KBED (Hanscom Field).
I graduated a few months later, and spent the summer (in addition to having a job, but this page is about flying) preparing for my checkride, which I passed in September 2013.
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An eager young beaver.
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About to take my friend Danny for a city tour. Fun fact: you probably shouldn't physically touch the static ports, you really don't want them clogged.
Shaking off the rust
I Perfect Day for the next few years, and didn't really get back into flying until 2018. By now, I was in the Bay Area, so I started renting DA40s out of Hayward (KHWD). All I could really do was buzz around the practice areas or take friends and family on Bay tours -- renting for more than an hour or two is really difficult to schedule, so overnight trips were out of the question.
Don't get me wrong, though. Even just limited to daytime in good weather for an hour or two at a time, flying in California is absolutely glorious. Allow me to undercut my point with these crappy cell phone photos:
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About to fly through the Tioga Pass to Mono Lake. Fun fact: I should have told literally anyone I was doing this solo flight, across mountains, at sunset.
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The view from South Bay.
Instrument flying
Along with limited access to flying opportunities, I had a general understanding that I was still woefully inexperienced and unable to safely fly at night, around mountains, or in clouds (e.g., the ever-present coastal marine layer). This led me to pursue my instrument rating in 2020. It was a lot of fun, I learned a ton and became a more proficient pilot. If you're a pilot, you may enjoy my write-up of my IFR checkride experience.
Having unlocked the ability to actually fly around California and across the mountains, I started looking into ways to, well, do it more. I really wanted to be able to take weekend trips up and down the coast, or -- my dream -- fly coast-to-coast, and be able to experience flying around New York and Boston again.
So, I was thrilled when I learned about Diamondshare: a sort of guided way to set up fractional ownership of an airplane. Essentially, the owner provides "unlimited" access (subject to availability) to members who pay a little over a grand per month. With three members, the cost of the plane breaks even; with four, you're profiting modestly. Nice! Better yet, the Diamondshare team makes everything easy -- they source members, they have boilerplate documents and cost modeling/marketing material, etc.
And so it was that I became the proud owner of Lemur, a brand-spanking-new DA40-NG. For those that don't know, the DA40 is already a pretty cool plane, but the -NG model is incredible; it uses a diesel engine so it can run on Jet-A (jet fuel) rather than aviation gas (admittedly, this doesn't matter that much, but it's cheaper, smells better, and definitely feels cooler), and more importantly, it has FADEC: Full Authority Digital Engine Control, meaning it turns on with a simple turn of a key, and one lever controls the throttle as well as any babysitting of the fuel-air mixture that the engine needs.
You may be thinking, "So what? That's how every car has worked for decades," and you'd be right, but most of general aviation is very much stuck several decades ago (see also: "low-lead gas" is NOT "unleaded").
The FADEC design also vastly simplifies the pre-takeoff runup: you also just hold a button down and it runs some engine tests automatically, and you're good to go within a minute. I often was able to tell airport controllers, "negative runup," because I could easily do it quickly before calling tower at the runway hold line.
Diamondshare was great, and when Lemur was not in the shop, it was an absolute dream to fly. But, well, it often was. Sadly, there always seemed to be something or other wrong with the plane, and because the manufacturer is in Austria, parts and support were slow and costly. As a result, aircraft availability ended up being limited, my members (and I) were frequently disappointed, and the whole thing kind of sucked. We ended it after a year. N297LA
One of the last things I did with Lemur was to fly across the country. The stars aligned and I had meetings in Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York -- basically perfect fuel stops (and business use -- awesome!) My friends were getting together for a weekend trip in the Hudson Valley, and I was able to land and take off from a tiny airstrip nearby (Kingston-Ulster, 20N).