CloudHound wrote:How does your 80/20 look?
It's a little bit chicken and egg, but...
I would say 80% of my time would be grabbing 1 - 2 hour slots - mostly weekday evenings in Summer, or a Sunday morning at the weekend - and just stretching the legs without a particularly purpose. 1 - 2 hours doesn't really get me very far from where I am (as in, if I'm flying somewhere, landing and returning, it's not a big range), but my point is: I would feel a lot happier bimbling with no specific purpose if it wasn't costing me £150 - £200 each time.
At the moment, the other 20% is choosing somewhere specific to fly in and visit - and trying to make that a much longer trip. At the moment, for me in the C42, that 'longer trip' isn't actually that long - from Deanland to Sandown a couple of weeks back is an example - but if I had access to something faster, I'd go further. For this, I typically book a morning or full day off work.
My 80% would be split so that it's 40% 'just me' and 40% 'with a passenger', with the passenger typically one of my young kids.
My 20% would almost always be 'with a passenger'; the bit to question on this is that actually, I'd love to have 'with 3 passengers' and take my whole family on the longer trips, which a microlight obviously prohibits.
So, in summary:
40% bimbling on my own locally
40% bimbling with a passenger locally
20% longer day trips with my family (ideally)
Therefore, back to what I am thinking based on these responses; my 20% would be better served by something faster and bigger that I can hire - so upgrading NPPL(M) to SSEA and then hiring a 4-seater when needed, but for the 80% I'm happy with pretty much anything....in my head, I'm definitely interested in exploring flex-wings as a budget way of bimbling without breaking the bank.
Being serious though, I don't really know how those two things would combine in reality: presumably, I'd just be creating a rod for my own back as I'd then need to maintain club currency on something expensive on top of any flex-wing bimbling. But, I've got plenty of food for thought from this thread to digest...
Thanks all once again.