I'm a student pilot, and based on conversations I've had with my CFI (certified flight instructor), this article seems accurate. Basically, it's really expensi

I'm a student pilot, and based on conversations I've had with my CFI (certified flight instructor), this article seems accurate. Basically, it's really expensive to learn to fly. Think $112/hr for an extremely basic 2 seat plane, and around $65/hr for the instructor, at least in the NY area. Even assuming you do all the bookwork on your own without an instructor, that's around $7-8k for a private license(40-50h). After that, you need to get an instrument rating(40h), for around the same price. Then, at 250 hours, you can get a commercial rating which lets you fly people around for money (you can't solicit passengers though). At this point, pilots usually go for a CFI rating, which lets them teach students. Most flight schools are happy to have the cheap labor, and the pilots want to get more hours so they can apply to regional airlines. The pay is pretty horrible (maybe $20-$30/h when you start), but it's the only way to build hours for most pilots. After doing this for a while (could be up to 600-700h), pilots either manage to find a gig flying businesspeople around on a corporate jet, an odd job like ferrying cargo around on a small plane, or go to a regional carrier. Regional carriers pay even worse than being a CFI, around $20k-$30k starting, but the tradeoff is that you're building time in a "serious" turboprop/jet plane, which the big airlines require before even hiring you as a first officer. You have to take on a massive amount of debt to become a pilot, then get paid terrible wages once you start. Even when you hit the top and become a captain at a major airline you're still only making around $100-$110k, and very few pilots achieve this. Raising the number of hours required to be hired as a pilot will cause less people to become pilots. It means CFIs will be instructors for much longer, making it harder for newly minted CFIs to find a job to pay off their debt. The fundamental problem is that avgas costs a ton (up to $6-$7 in NY). If it was free, or at least much cheaper, to fly a plane, the hour requirements would not be a problem - pilots could just train for longer. I think the solution is going to be electric trainer planes. I see the most promising company in this area as beyond aviation (http://www.beyond-aviation.com/ http://www.beyond-aviation.com/). They're developing an electric version of the Cessna 172, the most popular plane produced to date(43k+). Their president was the COO at Cessna for 6 years, so I'm really hopeful they can achieve their goal. An electric plane has three major benefits: no avgas needed, air inlets can be reduced significantly (no oxygen-hogging combustion reactions) for reduced drag, and significantly reduced TBO. Background: on piston engine planes, a mechanic needs to disassemble the engine every ~2k hours of flying, replace bad parts, and reassemble it. This costs around $15k, contributing a nontrivial amount of money to cost of flying. On an electric planes, the engines last much longer (think 20k-30k hours), so this cost all but vanishes.