Mark Newton, owner of an RV-6, extols the safety virtues of owning his own aircraft and the joy of passengers.
Let’s get this out of the way first: Owning a private aircraft for recreation is an indulgent extravagance.
It’s cynically enjoyable to dress it up in all kinds of rationalisations, but a personal aircraft is, at its root, a toy, like a tennis racquet or a Meccano set or a fishing boat or a dirt bike or a race car.
That’s how my entry into private aircraft ownership was framed, anyway. A small collection of friends wanted to form a syndicate to buy an aircraft. When we started, we didn’t have any fixed opinions about what kind of aircraft we’d acquire, but we knew the attributes we wanted, and we approached it like the fixed-wing equivalent of the BBC TV series, “Escape to the Country.”
One of the attributes on the list was, “Each syndicate member shouldn’t need to stump up money in excess of what they’d spend to buy a jet ski.” We were buying a toy, right?
We ended up with a 1000-hour RV-6 that had been constructed by an experienced builder in Western Australia. I fell in love with it when I was ferrying it back to its new home in Adelaide from Perth, and when I emigrated to Sydney a few years later I realised I’d rather buyout the other partners than give up my share, so all of a sudden it wasn’t in jet ski territory anymore and I owned the whole thing.
Whoops.
Capital Improvement Projects
Owning the aircraft has enriched my aviation experience in two notable ways.
Firstly: The fact that it’s an experimental/amateur built aircraft, devoid of the necessity to comply with a type certificate, has meant I’ve always been able
