Right Seat: Living the dream

For the vast majority of pilots, aircraft and airports are forever linked. Flying activity for them begins and ends at an airport. For a lucky few that’s not always the case.

I had a dream when I first got into flying that I wanted to keep an airplane at my house. I say dream because it was a bit of a fanciful idea. There was no runway, and I didn’t live in a fly-in community. It was just a house in the country, which I thought suited an airplane just fine. I measured open fields and walked them looking for big holes and rocks. While it may be possible, I’ve never tried landing there—I don’t have the training, nor the courage, to give it a shot.

This is how aviation started. The Wright brothers didn’t use a runway, and it wasn’t until decades later that the concept of a single landing lane that everyone uses came into fashion. We call airports “fields” for a reason.

Lucky for me, aviation is starting to come full circle. From the very real and exciting to the absurd and sci-fi, people are thinking of ways to get closer to their airplanes and use them whenever and wherever they wish.

People are thinking of ways to get closer to their airplanes and use them whenever and wherever they wish.Let’s start with the very real. There’s helicopters, of course. But very few people can afford to buy a helicopter, much less the fuel and maintenance required to operate one. Even if you can afford one, you can’t always keep it in your garage. From noise to safe entry and exit routes, most suburban houses won’t allow it.

Gyrocopters are an interesting—and at least in the United States, still an untapped—area of flight. These amazing machines combine 80 percent of the benefit of a helicopter and add in about 40 percent of the benefit of an airplane to give you a fun and capable machine. They need more room than a helicopter to operate, but a space the size of a football field isn’t out the question.

Then we have flying cars, or roadable airplanes, or whatever you like to call them. I’m not sure technology that essentially combines a lousy airplane and a lousy car is our future, but flying cars certainly remain in our collective dreams as some sort of paragon of personal transportation. Some of the current designs are intriguing, but ultimately rental cars are too cheap to make them viable.

Finally, there is the current hype, eVTOL, or electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. If you believe Uber and others, within a few short years people will get from one place to another in cities by summoning an electrically powered aircraft that will depart vertically from your location and land at your downtown destination. I won’t get into why this is more than a few years in the future, but suffice to say I wouldn’t put a deposit on one yet.

There is one more way to get closer to your airplane that is fun, practical, inexpensive, and available today: Bring it with you. Many people have tried, but Dr. Robert Jones, a retired doctor and public health official, seems to have had the best success. Armed with a standard toy-hauler trailer and a converted full-size van, Jones and his wife, Dusti, travel the country with their Kitfox in tow. When the mood strikes them, they see something beautiful they want to scope out from the air, or when they get the itch, Bob takes 10 minutes to unload the Kitfox, unfold the wings, and go flying.

When they are at their house in Marathon, Florida, Bob tows the Kitfox down the street on a dolly and is flying within minutes. Out West, it can be even faster because the airplane is so capable he can pull off the road and fly from his spot of choice.

The Joneses are living the dream.