How far can you go in a small plane for your money?

The $100 hamburger is a cliche of hobby aviation.  The idea being that you fly somewhere for a meal, and when including the cost of the flight the meal costs $100.  Well that trope is pretty old and flying costs have escalated.

I've often had people ask me how much it costs to fly someplace.  There isn't a standard answer and it's hard to calculate because of various factors described, as I will now summarize.

My Piper Warrior

Background: I fly a Piper PA28-161 Warrior.  This plane type is available for rent at the Wings of Carolina Flying Club, based at the Raleigh Executive Jetport north of Sanford, NC.  The rental rate is wet, meaning everything including fuel is included, so the plane rental is the all-in cost of the flight.  The price of the rental fluctuates with fuel costs but as of this writing it is just under $105 per hour.


For your $105 per hour you get a four-seat airplane that cruises at 110 knots, or 127 miles per hour.  This is airspeed, your ground speed is affected by the winds.  For example, if you are flying against a 10 mph headwind, your speed over the ground will be 117 miles per hour.  You'll also fly slower while climbing to your cruising altitude.

Coming up with a cost by computing raw distance vs speed vs rental rate isn't sufficient because rental rates are from engine start to engine stop so you also have to account for preflight, taxiing, maneuvering in the local terminal area, etc.  Your rental time is read off a Hobbs meter that starts and stops with engine start and stop, so is usually called "Hobbs Time"

I've tried playing around with flight planning tools to make an approximation but the results don't account for all these factors so the numbers are off.  The only way to know is actual experience.

So I did some historical research in my logbook, and combined it with current airplane costs to come up for some costs for various destinations I've been to.  Hopefully this will help answer two questions, one being "how much does it cost to fly to x?" and  the other being "where can you fly for $y?"

The results are in the following table, sorted by ascending distance:

Destination	Round Trip Hobbes Time from Sanford, NC (hours)	Round trip rental plane cost (at $105/hour)	Notes
Asheboro, NC	1.2	$126.00	Nice aviation museum on the field
Person County, NC	1.3	$136.50	Nearby steakhouse will pick you up on the field
Goldsboro, NC	1.7	$178.50	Good place for Eastern NC BBQ
Lexington, NC	1.7	$178.50	Good place for Western NC BBQ
South Boston, VA	1.8	$189.00
Southport, NC	2.7	$283.50
Washington, NC	2.7	$283.50
New Bern, NC	2.7	$283.50
Blacksburg, VA	3.0	$315.00	Go Hokies! The stadium and coliseum are an easy walk from the airport.
Ocracoke, NC	3.4	$357.00	Nearby restaurant will pick you up on the field. This would be over an 11 hour round trip by car + ferry
Charleston, SC	4	$420.00
Tangier Island, VA	5.2	$546.00	Difficult to reach any other way but airplane!
Murphy, NC	5.5	$577.50	With stop in Asheville. This is as far west as you can go in NC
Cincinnati, OH (Lunken Field)	6.9	$724.50	Nice restaurant on the field. About as far as you can comfortably go without a fuel stop.
Seneca Falls, NY	9.8	$1,029.00	The Finger Lakes area of New York. Fuel stops in both directions.
Plattsburgh, NY	13.8	$1,449.00	Includes fuel stops in both directions. This airport is very near Burlington VT so the cost to there would probably be virtually the same.
Oshkosh, WI	16	$1,680.00	Includes fuel stops and spectacular flight up the Chicago lakeshore. Famous annual air show held here

You may think that some of these costs are high, and they can get high as flying is not a cheap hobby. But many if not most of these flights, especially to dinner destinations, are made with another pilot sharing the flying time and the expenses, so one person's cost for the flights is half the amount shown.  On trips to Oshkosh, sometimes three pilots go and share flying and expenses.

Another note is the big jump in time and therefore cost between Cincy and farther destinations, even though the distance is not necessarily proportionally more.  This is because once you get farther than Cincy, you have to make a fuel stop in a Warrior.  A fuel stop means extra maneuvering to land,  taxiing in and out, and taking off again and climbing out again.  This adds to the flight time.

To illustrate the cost of a fuel stop, look at the flight to Plattsburgh, NY.  I've also done this flight in a Mooney M20J, which can make the trip non-stop and also flies faster: 145 knots, which is 167mph.  This flight took 9.6 hours round trip, with no fuel stop.  However the Mooney is also more expensive to rent: $165/hr. So that flight would cost $1,584 today, or only $135 more in a much more expensive and better equipped plane that gets you there faster.  This is because of the shorter flight time, which is because of both a faster plane and the avoided overhead of a fuel stop.

There are some famous flying destinations that I have been that are not listed here.  Especially the First Flight Memorial airport at Kitty Hawk, and Asheville.  This is because to keep this list precise, I only listed flights that were directly out and back with no additional stops and no local flying at the destination.  Also some of the places I've been were not in a Warrior, so the flight times would different.  I guess that gives me an excuse to fly...I need to take the Warrior directly out and back to these places, to get numbers to update this post with!

Propane heat is for suckers... and yes that includes me

This winter saw not only the Polar Vortex, but also a propane price shock.  Propane is widely used in rural areas where natural gas is not available.

To get an idea of how much of a price shock we had in propane, here is a graph of weekly residential propane prices, from 1990 to the present day as of this writing.

This graph is a screenshot from the US Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration website. You can go there to see current information at any given time.  Note that data is only tracked during the heating season, which is Oct-March, so summer prices are not shown here.   

As you can see propane prices were nice and stable through the 1990s and then went on a gradual, steady climb from about 2004 until 2008, then bounced around a little, and then shot up this year.  Even though this graph shows prices peaking just above $4 a gallon, many people in this area were playing upwards of $5 for propane in February, which is crazy because we should not be having shortages... a propane pipeline runs through this area and there is a major terminal in Apex. 

OK, but how does this affect me?

My house has a heat pump with a propane furnace as backup.  Basically when the temperature gets below 40 degrees, it turns into a propane furnace.  This design is supposed to be the best of both words, avoiding the "feels cold" problem of heat pumps but still getting heat pump efficiency when it's not terribly cold out. However I built my house in 1999.  Looking at the graph above, that's when propane was bouncing around $1 a gallon and my heat pump was designed in that price environment.  With propane going up much higher recently, those design optimizations are no longer so optimal. 

Bottom line I recently got a propane bill for $850. That was for enough gas to last for 34 days, from Jan 17 to Feb 21.   Talking to others who use propane heat that's not an usual experience and is actually a bit on the low side.  Because I own my propane tank instead of renting from a propane company, I'm able to shop around for the best deal in the summer and fall, so the peak price I paid was $3 a gallon.  That's still high but at least it's not the $5 that some others around me who didn't have a choice were paying, either because they did not sign a contract in the summer, or can't shop around because their propane tank is owned by their gas company.

So it's obviously now expensive to use propane but how does it really compare to other heat sources I could be using?  How much more am I really paying than I would with a heat pump, for example?

Propane cost vs. other heat sources

The Energy Information Administration comes to the rescue with excellent data again.  They publish an excellent spreadsheet for comparing the cost of different heating methods.  You plug in your local costs and appliance efficiency ratings and it compares the cost of using different heating methods.  I did this for our local area and it was eye opening.

The table below comes from my work on this spreadsheet.  It shows what the price per gallon for propane would have to be to be competitive with different methods of heating your home.  I defined "competitive" as "within 10%".  The electricity rate I used is Duke Energy's standard residential rate of 9.6701 cents per kwh, set September 2013 and still in effect as of this writing.  

Heating Method	Propane is competitive at	Comments
Electric heat pump	$0.98	Assumes Heat Pump HSPF of 9.0 and use of electric strip heaters in NC climate (effective HSPF 7.8 when accounting for use of strip heaters)
Electric baseboard heater	$2.22	Assumes 100% efficiency
Natural Gas	$0.82	Uses PSNC rate of $0.85 per therm and assumes furnace AFUE of 82%
Wood Stove	$1.13	Assumes wood purchase price of $200/cord per http://ncfirewood.co/firewood-prices/ and wood stove efficency of 63%
Kerosene	$3.10	Assumes Kerosene is $4.27/gal in an 80% efficient room heater

Details on the numbers

Some notes on the efficiency ratings. I used the default values provided by the EIA, which they say are the minimum acceptable values, so if you have decent equipment your efficiency ratings are probably higher.  For the efficiency of electric heat pumps, there is an adjustment for climate to account for the time that the electric strip heaters have to kick in to help.  So in NC, for example, the EIA says a heat pump with an HSPF of 9.0 is treated like 7.8, which is the number I used in the calculations above.

So, what does this tell us?

Looking at the above table in conjunction with the price chart above, it's obvious that propane is hardly ever an economical heat source.  It really only consistently beats Kerosene room heaters.

The price for wood heat assumes you have to buy the wood.  If you're cutting it off your own property or someone is giving you wood, like letting you have it  for free if you haul it off, it's obviously an even better deal, though that's quite high maintenance.

Natural gas is the cheapest mainstream heat source, but in rural areas that's not relevant because there are no gas lines.

The primary mainstream alternative for rural areas in NC is the electric heat pump, which propane has to be under $1 a gallon to be competitive with.  That hasn't happened in years and likely never will again in the foreseeable future.  So as a strictly financial proposition, it never makes sense to heat with propane instead of a heat pump.

There is however an emotional component.  Because electric heat pumps blow air that is warm but below body temperature, a lot of people complain that they feel cold and assert that they'll pay more to heat with propane and be comfortable.  That's understandable, but 2-3 times more?  That gets harder to swallow, but if you do it with eyes open more power to you.

But on the other hand, even that may not be necessary to be comfortable. Look at the relative cost for electric baseboard heat.  This is usually considered the most expensive mainstream way to heat, but it's cheaper than propane when propane exceeds $2.22 a gallon, which it has in fact done for most of the last few heating seasons.

This is relevant because most heat pumps are designed to work at temperatures down to about 40 degrees, and they have electric strip heaters that kick in when it gets too cold for them to keep up.  Electric strip heaters work pretty much like baseboard heat and in my opinion would be similar in cost to run.  Most heat pump owners complain about high bills when the electric strip heaters come on, but in fact even the electric strip heaters in a heat pump are cheaper than propane has been in the last few heating seasons.

What this means in my opinion is that the smart thing to do if spec'ing a house today, or replacing  your HVAC system, would be to just get an electric heat pump.  If the air out of it feels cold then put it in emergency mode and run it off the electric strip heaters.  It'll be expensive, but still cheaper than propane in today's market!

The War on Christmas has been going on longer than we suspected!

Conservative commentators getting worked up over a so-called War on Christmas has become a cherished holiday tradition these days.  They are particularly upset about people wishing each other "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" instead of "Merry Christmas."

Well as it turns out I belong to one of the millions of Facebook groups dedicated to local nostalgia, this one in particular being "You know you grew up in Cary, NC when..."  I think there is one of these for every burg or city in the nation.  Anyway, this year one member  has taken to posting scans of old holiday ads from the Cary News. They are great to see and great nostalgia.

 Here are a few samples, all from the early to mid 1960s:

Too bad we didn't have FOX News around then to tell us how awful these seasonal ads were because they didn't all specifically say "Merry Christmas"!

Maybe this is evidence that the War on Christmas started as a small guerrilla action and has taken 50 years to reach the full grown insurgency that we are told is going on now?  Or maybe right-wingers just didn't get their panties in a bunch as much back then.  Or maybe we just didn't have a provocateur class that profited so much from stirring up culture wars.  Anyway these ads are all perfectly charming and nice.

And btw it's also perfectly charming and nice for someone to wish you Happy Holidays or Seasons Greetings today as well.

Why the Big 12 will get a conference championship game without expanding

There are few interesting tidbits in this article: http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/blog/dennis-dodd/21620974/acc/big-12-alliance-makes-sense-to-stiff-arm-conference-realigment

I'll concentrate on one here.  Apparently the B12 may soon propose allowing conferences to hold a championship game with only 10 teams, and not even requiring divisions.

In 2004 the ACC tried to get this through because it only had 11 teams, and it didn't go anywhere. Now I think it will pass easily.  The difference is that with the size of today's leagues, divisions no longer work.

Look at the ACC because I know it best.  Two 7 team divisions.  One protected cross-division rival.  8 conference games.   See the illustration above.  Do the math.  It will be TEN YEARS between times an ACC team plays a non-protected cross-division rival.  The SEC will be in the same boat, and the B1G will also have 14 teams soon.   This is not looking like a conference.   More like a federation.

The solution to this is to dispense with divisions and go to one big "division" in which the teams rotate games every year. So instead of having to play the same seven teams every year (your division mates plus your protected crossover rival) and only having 1  game to rotate between the remaining 6 teams on the other side, you now only have to play one team (your main rival) every year and can rotate the remaining 7 games among the other 12 teams.  Or with more than one protected rival, you only have 2-3 teams you play every year and have 5-6 games to rotate among your other 10-11 conference mates.  Either way the math shows that you only go 2-3 years between games with other teams, instead of a whole freaking decade.

The basic point is this:  these 14 team leagues (and bigger in the future) have made divisions obsolete if you want your league to look anything like a real conference where teams play each other with reasonable frequency.   And because of this, I think the proposal to eliminate the need for divisions and 12 teams for a championship game will come up and pass.

I have been iAssimilated

In the summer of 2010 I wrote extensively on this blog about selecting a smart phone and why I chose Android over iPhone.   Now it's two and a half years later and I'm making the decision again and this time it came up iPhone.  Today I bought and activated my iPhone 5.

Thanks, Google

Ironically, it was Google that made the transition feasible.  My biggest issue with iPhone was a poor or nonexistent Gmail client, especially lack of multi-account support, because maintaining and monitoring multiple Gmail accounts smoothly is important to me since I have a personal Gmail and one for Cat Angels, where I volunteer.  I  did not find iOS's built-in mail client adequate to the task because, while it tried to simulate Gmail's threading, the threads don't include the sent emails unless you copy yourself on everything, and it lacked capabilities like an ability to mark multiple emails at once for an action like archive or move to a folder.

Well Google just put a new Gmail app in the iTunes store and it is better than the one on Android, including with built-in multi-account support.  Google also dropped a Maps app into the store that is as good as if not better than their Android version, and solves the most glaring weakness of iOS. They also updated their Youtube app.  With all that put together, Google solved all of the major issues I had remaining with iOS and enabled me to make the switch.  I'm not sure that was their intention... but their good work on iOS apps makes it easier to switch from their operating system to Apple.

iTunes Albatross gone

One of my biggest iPhone complaints was that you had to use iTunes to do any maintenance or even activate the phone. I wrote a blog entry back in March complaining about it.   Well Apple must have heard lots of complaints about that because shortly after that, with I think iOS 5, iOS devices became capable of updating without requiring iTunes. Even better, I've also noticed on my new iPhone that even while the phone is synching with iTunes, it's still usable and no reboots or multiple backups are required.  So Apple has made major strides in this area.

Not new to iOS

I'm not a newbie to iOS, I've had an iPad 2 since they first came out so that made it easier for me to monitor developments in iOS land.  I tried all the new Google apps there before making the switch.  I already knew the strengths and advantages of each operating system and said for a long time,"if only Google and Apple would just settle their differences and get good Google apps in the iPhone, that would be the best of both worlds." And that's what happened.

Why abandon Android

After two and a half years with Android I was getting very familiar with its weaknesses.

Flawed Memory Structure

The biggest weakness that started hitting me in recent months was the memory structure. Android phone memory is split into two parts: on-board and SD card.  You can put a big SD card in your phone and have room for gigs and gigs of pictures and music, but the onboard memory is much smaller and not upgradeable.  Most of the apps on an Android phone have to live in the on-board memory, and some of them can't even store their data on the SD card.  Facebook was a particularly piggish offender here.

My phone had 400M of on-board memory and a 32G SD card.  And that 400M was filling up.  This means that even though I hadn't even filled half of my SD card, I was out of memory on my phone.   I was constantly getting messages that my memory was low and I was always having to clean out caches  or delete apps to keep my phone running.  And while Android's app manager has a "move to SD card" button, that was frustratingly greyed out on almost every single app. Bottom line, I had 20 gig free on my SD card but my phone was out of memory. That's just stupid, and it's not a flaw you notice until you've had the phone a while.

I know that Android phones being sold now have more internal memory... looks like 2G is the new standard.  But that's just pushing the problem down the road as apps continue to get large and continue to not be able to use the SD card.  In a year or two, that will probably be inadequate as well.  By contrast, with a 64G iPhone, you have 64G available for everything... apps and data.

I also know that there is a semi-hack to move apps to the SD card.  But I don't find it acceptable to have to install two development kits (Android and Java) just to change one setting on the phone and make it do what it should already be able to do.

Inconsistent phone ecosystem

When I started looking for a replacement for my Evo, it became clear that if I went to any non-HTC phone, and maybe even a new HTC phone, I would be starting with a new look and feel and a different enough feature set that the transition from one Android phone to another had potential to be just as annoying as the transition from Android to iPhone.  So why not reconsider the iPhone?

Killer Apps

As a private pilot, there is one iOS app I depend on immensely: Foreflight.  And there is no Forelfight for Android, and never will be.  The Foreflight team is too small and doesn't have the resources to do multiple platforms... they are iOS only, and that's their business model. It's resulted in a top notch app that's become essential on the cockpit, but you gotta be on iOS to play.

I have it on my iPad and that's what I use in the plane and during preflight, but seeing how handy it is for my pilot peers to also have it on their phones is really eye opening.  And as a side benefit, Foreflight has a better weather radar presentation than any other app, including The Weather Channel, WRAL, etc.

By contrast, there isn't a single Android app I can think of that isn't also on iPhone, and usually the iPhone version is better than the Android version...including Google's own apps!

Physical build quality

The physical build quality of Apple devices is head and shoulders above everyone else.  My HTC developed the following problems in the two and a half years I used it:

• The spring broke on the kickstand, so it always stuck out
• The plastic around the button on the top started cracking
• The batteries required replacement every six months.  They just didn't last. 
• And worst of all, the charging port became unreliable.  It got loose and the micro USB could easily fall out or be knocked out by a cat walking by it on the bedside table.  I'm not the only one this happened too either, talking to other HTC phone owners and googling finds this is a common and well known problem. It's pretty frustrating to wake up and find out that the phone didn't charge last night like I expected it to so I start the day with 10% battery instead of 100%.  By contrast my wife and I have had various iOS devices (iPod, iPad, her iPhone) and none of the connections on any of them ever came loose.  

Before that I had a Blackberry whose cursor wheel and keyboard started failing after one year.

Could another Android phone be better built?  Maybe.  But I know the Apple phones are very well built and the reviews I've read of other Android phones don't give me the impression they are as well made.

So how was the transition?

The transition was much easier than I expected.  Before buying the iPhone I took the SD card out of the Evo and copied its contents onto my PC where iTunes is running.  I pointed iTunes to the music and picture files in that copy, and they all imported seamlessly and were put onto the iPhone on the first synch.  I was able to get my ringtones back without having to buy them after finding these instructions on the internet.  I bought Downcast for $2 to manage my podcasts, so I don't need iTunes for that.  Because I used Keepass for my password vault and it's supported on both platforms, moving that data was a snap as well... just import the key file into iTunes from the HTC's SD card and it went on the iPhone automatically.

Bottom line: within 3-4 hours of getting home with my new iPhone, I had everything moved and everything set up like I wanted.. and that was while multitasking and doing other things around the house too.

Now to learn more about iCloud and do I want to use it....

The superconference scheduling solution

The problem with superconferences

I've always thought that superconferences suck.  They don't have the cohesion and frequency of  play as smaller conferences.  In my opinion the ideal conference size is 9, because then you can play full round robin in football and full double round robin in basketball.

12 is the absolute maximum.  In a 12 team league with two six-team divisions and one protected rivalry, you'll play every team in the other division that isn't your protected rival twice every 5 years. That's really  pushing it.  If a hypothetical college student can get through his whole standard four years in school withoug his football team playing another football during that whole time, they aren't really in the same conference in my opinion.

Now the ACC, Big Ten, and SEC are going to 14 teams.  In a 14 team league with two divisions and one protected rivalry, you'll play each non-protected rival in the other division twice every six years.  That sucks. That's not a conference.  Not to mention how messy basketball gets.

The decision makers don't care

That said, the train has already left the station.  We are headed toward superconferences.  The reason we are headed that way is because of TV money.  The university presidents and boards of trustees couldn't care less about the fan considerations I listed above.  So we have to find a way to make these unwieldy leagues work.

The solution

Ironically, the solution to this problem is to grow bigger.  That sounds conterintuitive, but hear me out there.

For football: 16 teams divided into four quadrants. 9 game conference schedule.  Every two years the quadrants rotate like this:

• Quadrant A and Quadrant B form one division, and Quadrant C and Quadrant D form the other division. 
• Two years later, the divisions change to AC and BD.
• Two years later... lather, rinse repeat. 
• Also, each quadrant plays two teams from the quadrant it will never be paired with, rotating every two years. So for example, quadrant A plays two teams out of quadrant D in years 1 and 2, then the other two teams out of quadrant D in years 3 and 4

If you do the math, you see that everyone plays everyone else at least twice every four years. That's as close to ideal as a superconference will get.

What about protected rivalries?  There are no protected rivalries.  You design the quadrants properly, so that important rivalries are within the same quandrant.  Yes that means that important rivals will never play each other in the league championship game... but really, how often has that actually happened in the real world with today's league setups?

You may also ask.. .wait, didn't the WAC try this and fail? Yes they did, in the 1990s.  But they didn't fail because of the quadrants.  They failed because they diluted their product with inferior teams, plus they had teams that were as far as 3900 miles apart making travel costs prohibitive for a relatively low-revenue league.  I don't think a 16 team SEC, Big Ten, ACC, or Big 12 would have those problems.

Plus one more thing: the quadrants looked awkward in the 1990s because they were being compared with 9, 10, and 12 team leagues.   Now the point of comparison is 14 team leagues, which are awful. Against 14 team leagues, quadrants look pretty cohesive.

What about basketball?

OK, since I"m an ACC fan I guess this needs to be addressed.  The biggest problem with today's ACC and other superconferences is the unbalanced schedule.  With the 16 team league, you actually solve that problem. Simply play a 16 team league schedule, with a full single round robin plus ONE protected rival that you play home and home.  So in the ACC for example those protected rivals would be pairs like Duke-UNC, UVA-VT, GT-Clemson, Miami-FSU, NCSU-Wake,  etc.  It's much more balanced than the 14 team setup with 18 league games that the ACC is contemplating,  where each team has ten one-play rivals and 4 two-play rivals (one of which is constant and three of which rotate), resulting in some schedules being much easier than others.

And by the way, the Big East has shown that a 16 team basketball league can be pretty damn good.

Mazda Miata vs. Mini Roadster

In 1996 I bought a new Mazda Miata.  I owned it for 16 years but last month I put it into a guardrail on a wet day and it was totaled.    The damage wasn't that great (happened below 30 mph on an on-ramp) but the car was old enough and valued low enough that it was totaled.  So it was time to find a replacement convertible.  I have a 1998 LS400 as my daily driver, so this is strictly a fun car which gives me different standards than usual. I started out with a large field and eliminated several cars just thinking and researching it  for various reasons:

• Used BMW E46 convertible:  Almost impossible to find with a manual transmission.  Too much car for a sunny day toy.  Sketchy reliability and expensive to own. If I bought one at the price point I want, I'd be getting it just when it starts needing expensive repairs and replacements
• Volkswagen EOS:  has more space and is a nice car but in my opinion, Volkswagen + complex top mechanism = disaster waiting to happen. Plus it has a pretty flexy body structure and is underpowered and expensive for what you get. 
• Used Miata: lots of them out there but hard to find one that's what I want, in good shape.  Also the previous generations are smaller inside (I was starting to feel that in mine that wrecked) and as I get older the act of putting up the top from inside the car gets harder. Since I kept the last one 16 years and will probably keep this one long term, a used one already has some time used up and closer to being a jalopy.  The newer ones that have the hardtop I want all have automatic transmissions and nearly-new prices on the used market. 

So I was down to a Mini Convertible and a Miata hardtop.  After a trip to the Mini dealer and some test drives I discovered the Mini Roadster and quickly decided it was a better contender than the Mini Convertible.  The Roadster has more trunk room, and when the top is down it doesn't block the bottom half of the view out the back like the convertible does.  Plus the roadster is designed so that the trunk access is not affected when the top is down, which is a virtue the Mini convertible lacks.  The only thing the Mini convertible brings that the Mini roadster doesn't is a back seat, which in a Mini is of zero value in my opinion.

So I found myself deciding between the Miata and the Mini Roadster. Here is my comparison.

Price: of course it all comes down to options and configuration but they are both high 20's to low 30's vehicles well equipped, and both have some flexibility on price.  This is a wash.

Exterior Appearance, top up: The Miata looks great, it all fits together.  The hardtop is body colored and works well with the shape of the car, with lots of glass.  On the Mini, the only top available is a black soft top which doesn't go well with any color except black. Plus the Mini top has a lot of black cloth and not enough glass so it looks even worse, especially from the rear, and it looks tacked onto the car. Advantage: Miata

Kinda awkward looking with the top up. 

It all fits together with the top up

Exterior appearance, top down:  They both look pretty good with the top down.  I think the Miata looks slightly better but not that much better.  Draw.

Nice looking with the top down

Also looks great with the top down

Interior appearance and ergonomics:  This one is no contest, the Miata by a mile.  Like all Minis, the Mini Roadster has a Fisher Price clown car interior with a pie plate speedometer in the center of the dashboard and a bunch of toggle switches that are randomly placed with tiny, cryptic labels.   Behind the steering wheel is a completely useless "openometer" that purports to measure your cumulative top-down time (why?) and a  tach that you can't really use because its top half is  blocked by the steering wheel. Even though the steering wheel is adjustable the instruments move with it so you can't adjust the steering wheel to make the top of the tach visible. Mini clearly knows the center speedometer is useless because there is also a digital speedometer in the tach, where the real speedometer should be.  But I don't like digital speedometers.   In my opinion, the speedometer should be where the tach is and the tach should be where the openometer is. The Miata on the other hand has a very well executed traditional layout, all the instruments you need are right there in front of you and the steering wheel is adjustable separate from the instrument binnacle, everything is clearly labeled and the switches are big enough to easily use. 

Seriously, Mini?

That's more like it. 

Comfort:  The Mini is a more comfortable car.  It has more interior room and wider seats that are more comfortable and also there is more room in all directions: more legroom, more room between the driver's knees and the steering wheel, more space in the footwell, more headroom with the top up.  The Miata has aggressively bolstered sport seats which isn't how I like it. Other than that the seats are nice and the steering wheel feels nicer than the Mini.  The Miata has non-adjustable lumbar support that is too aggressive for my taste.

Powertrain:  The base Mini has a 121 horsepower engine, which is underpowered.  For about $3500 more you can get the S level which has 181 turbocharged horsepower.  All Miatas, including the base models have 167 naturally aspirated horsepower.  Both cars rev nicely, but I'm not a big fan of turbocharging and since it costs extra to get the oomph the Mini needs, the Miata gets the nod on this count.  The 6 speed manual transmissions in both cars work and feel nicely, but the Miata's is slightly better.  When I was test driving the Mini, I nearly backed into the car behind me at a stoplight because I was in reverse instead of 1st gear.  This wasn't a problem on the Miata, because its shifter is  more precise than the Mini, plus the Miata shifter feels better with a nicer leather covering, and a nicer shift motion, and clicking into gear better.  Advantage Miata. 

Driving experience: The Mini has a nice driving experience, but the Miata's is better.  The Miata is a purpose built rear wheel drive roadster designed for that mission from a clean sheet, while the Mini Roadster is adapted from the regular Mini platform and is front wheel drive.  Minis are fun cars to drive, but the Miata feels more like a complete put together roadster package. Both cars have relatively stiff suspension and noisy tires. They are, after all, sports cars. 

Practicality:  This has some overlap with interior and ergonomics, but the Mini is a more practical car.  It has more room, a bigger trunk, and a passthrough from the cabin to the trunk so you can reach into the trunk from the seats.  This is a nice feature, especially in a small cabin with limited storage.  Both cars are designed so that the top being down has no effect on the trunk space or access, which is something that much bigger and more expensive cars haven't been able to accomplish. Kudos to both Mazda and Mini for that.  My brother has an Infiniti G convertible and he says that when the top is down, you can get a ham sandwich in the trunk -- if it doesn't have lettuce.  I looked briefly at a Volvo C40 convertible and with the top down you can't even get to the trunk.    Both cars have cupholders but the Mini also has a styrofoam tray in the trunk right behind the door to the cabin that you can put ice and drinks in and reach from the cabin, which is pretty cool.  If I had to take a multi-hour road trip in one of these cars, I'd want to do it in the Mini. 

Top operation: Both are pretty easy.  The Mini comes standard with a manual top, but it has gas struts so when it's down you push a button and it pops up for easy grabbing and putting up.  It's easier than the manual top of the Miata, which I can't really operate from inside the car without shoulder and back discomfort because you have to twist around and dig down to lift it up.  The Miata hard top is simplicity itself, just push a button and it goes up or down in less than 15 seconds.  I didn't try the Mini's power top, didn't think it would be necessary since the manual top is so easy, but I assume it's just as easy as the Miata.  Slight Mini edge simply because its manual top is easier than the Miata's manual top. 

Options availability and flexibility:  This is a well-known Mini virtue.  You can get a Mini just about any way you want it with any combination of colors, accents, and options in just about any configuration. By contrast, the Miata is packaged like a typical Japanese car: it has a few colors,  very few interior/exterior color combinations, and a few option packages to choose from and even that is less flexible than it sounds. There are three Miata option packages and two of them require each other so there's really only  two configurations: no option packages (good luck finding one like that) and both option packages (the vast majority of them are built like this). The third package (appearance package) doesn't interest me and not many have it.  The option packages of course include unrelated options, for example bluetooth phone and xenon headlamps are both in the Miata Premium package.  Want one option? Take them all or live without. Advantage Mini.

Technology: Mazda is a few years behind here.  Bluetooth phone is only available on the very top end Miata, with a premium package.  Neither bluetooth music nor a USB port nor navigation are available from Mazda on a Miata at any price, though it does have an aux port to plug in the headphone jack of your iPhone or other music player.  The Mini has options for all those available on all levels of the car, plus it has Mini Connected, which is an iPhone app and interface that seems pretty cool -- if you have an iPhone, which I don't.  Advantage Mini. 

Reliability/Cost to own:  My last Miata was pretty much bulletproof for 16 years. Mazda has that reputation and it's confirmed by sites like Truedelta and Consumer Reports.  Mini reliability seems to be sketchier and and those sites also confirm that reputation. Mini also appears to be expensive to repair and maintain when things break which isn't that surprising since it's a BMW product. Advantage Miata. 

General Style:  I've heard the Miata called a girl's car, I assume that's because it's cute.   Whatever, at my age and happily married stage in life I don't care. I like it as long as I can get a manual transmission.   On the other hand the Mini has a wing on the back that rises at 50 miles an hour and goes back down at 30.  I hate that, is anything dumber than driving 40-45 through town with a wing up?  It's totally poseur/dorky and you can't turn it off.  Well it better be poseur, because if the Mini really needs a wing to have decent grip at 50 mph, something is seriously wrong with the chassis.  Advantage Miata. 

Final decision: I decided on the Miata.   Reliability is important to me and Mazda wins there.  I live in the sticks and getting a car to a shop to be repaired is a real logistical undertaking, plus the only Mini dealer in town is about as far away from me as you can get and still be in the Triangle area.  Miata's inferior interior room and comfort did give me pause but it's still a significant improvement over my first generation Miata and I lived with that for 16 years.  Plus I took a Miata on a two hour extended test drive and found that the cruise control goes a long way toward ameliorating any comfort problem, since on boring roads I can put it on and move/shift my legs around.   On fun roads the car seems to get bigger.  I also don't like Miata's technological inferiority but the fact is I'm not buying a phone accessory.  I can use the bluetooth phone and plug my audio jack into the aux port. It's not ideal but it's workable.  I don't need nav because my phone has it and I usually drive to places I already know. 

If I were choosing between the two for a daily driver I might  pick the Mini because of its better comfort and practicality.  I say "might" because I still don't think I could look at the Mini's dashboard and instrument panel every day.  I've read on various car blogs that you get used to it, but I don't know.  It's that bad and may be a deal breaker for the daily driver case.  However I have another daily driver car, so that point is moot.  I'm buying a toy and the Miata is a better toy.  It's more fun.

That said I don't dislike the Mini.  I chose a Miata for myself, but I'm glad Minis are on the road, and seeing one on the road usually makes me smile.  For me, Minis are best enjoyed looking at them from the outside.