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!