This question is ill posed... Do you mean "Is there a distance at which travel by general aviation becomes economical?"

Not sure "Economical" is the right word here. All general aviation pilots I know they are flying basically for fun, even if they are payed for it.

There are people in the EAA , building their own planes, sometimes longer than 10 years, flying 1-2 hours per weekend. Usually their destination is a small local airport, sometimes just a grass runway, with nothing to do there, and no local transportation to the nearby city. One person I know is carrying a small motorcycle in his plane, just so he can have some more mobility.

Same people are flying at "events" - see Air Venture, happening this week, at Oshkosh. Definite not "Economical", but for somebody passioned by aviation, that is the right place to be, and flying there gives a better sense of accomplishment.

I assume people are interested in flying their own personal aircraft, defined as an aircraft you can park in your own driveway. The proof to this is the plethora of "personal" multi-copters type of aircraft everybody is building today. I believe this is the wrong aircraft for personal use, as the multi-copters are the worst from aerodynamics and efficiency perspective.

To fly economical, the aircraft needs to fly on a wing, and have a decent L/D ratio. At this point, the design of the personal VTOL is not too much different than any VTOL a lot of people are designing since 50's. To date, all VTOL designs are a compromise, not flying as well as fixed wings, nor hovering as well as helicopters. The reason for this is the wings are dead weight in hover, big rotors are needed for hover, having lots of drag in forward flight, and the power required for hover is at least 5 times larger than for forward flight, meaning big, heavy, uneconomical engine to carry around all the time. This is the "VTOL conundrum" designers are struggling since the VTOL birth. Me and my team are working toward a solution to the VTOL conundrum, by designing a system having a wing that provides lift even in hover, reducing the power required for hover, and reducing the rotor diameter so it does not create a lot of drag in forward, airplane flight mode, increasing overall the L/D and efficiency of the aircraft.

Marc Azzopardi,

Yes, I do mean "Is there a distance at which travel by general aviation becomes economical?" with an emphasis on business travel. Is there a distance at which travel for business by general aviation becomes economical?

Dusan Stan,

Thank you for your reply to my question. I am looking to find out at what point for business travel does travel by general aviation either in the way of personal aircraft or charter aircraft does it become something that saves money rather than incurs more expense. Is there a distance at which point this form of travel becomes more economical than any other form of travel (ie. Car). Your reply makes sense to me. If you look at my research project you will see what is driving the question I am trying to find an answer to.

Traveling by car consumes roughly the same amount of fuel passenger/km. People usually travel by plane to save time and not because is more economical. Not sure if you save any time for flights shorter than 400 km if you consider extra time you spend besides flying.

I'm afraid you can't generalize that. Is is dependent on so many factors like

• maximum allowable travel time
• time from knowing the travel plan until you really depart
• personal habits
• availibility of airports near origin and destination and transportation from destination onwards
• urgency of travel
• ...

You also have to differentiate between self-travel (like owning or charter of a Cessna piston aircraft) and managed travel (like business charter jet or turboprop) because the the speeds, ranges and costs of the aircrafts are so different.

Perhaps it is useful to define an index like you do in professional aviation, which is called the "cost index" (CI). It is defined as (cost of traveltime) / (cost of fuel). If the CI is high, you fly faster because the cost of time is rated higher than the fuel cost.

Bastian Göbel

Thank you for your response. You have provided some really great information for my research. I will certainly look at the "cost index" as defined by (cost of traveltime)/(cost of fuel). I will also look at the differentiation between self-travel and managed travel.

Travelling by general aviation aircraft mostly means the travel by the business jets used for private or corporate purpose. It is generally as safe as airline transport. From the economic point of view the cost of such flight is much higher than price of an airline ticket, but one could save a lot of money due to travel arranged exactly on your demand, another advantage is that the bizjet could take you much closer to your intended destination as they are able to operate from smaller airports, less congested. You could save a lot of time not standing in long queues at passport and customs checks. This is why it is so popular among the top managers and VIPs.

Travelling by general aviation becomes economical. On the perspective of the consumer and as a business traveler ' economical' can be explained in four types of saves;

1. Save on energy - traveling by air is not tiresome as compared to surface travel, hence energy is saved for important business matters,

2. Save on time - it is faster to travel by air,

3. Save on money - money that could have been used for hotel and accommodation, the traveler can transact business and go back home, and

4. Save on psychological expense - business traveler can do business and go back home to familiar grounds where the traveler is psychologically settled.

Therefore when the traveler does a cost benefit analysis on using general aviation, it makes more economical sense to use general aviation especially where the traveler is presented with a variety of travel options.

I found good responses to your question. I also wish to add a few more points. First, the cost index is not only referring to the fuel's cost, it includes all other expenses such as the aircraft itself (whether it has been purchased or it has been leased by business), crew expenses, maintenance (quite a lot here to maintain it safe and sound), insurances, airport fees, landing fees, registration, legal expenses and many more. Second, it depends how often air travel is needed. The calculation would certainly be different (by the regularity or irregularity of the business trips). Finally, the distance required to travel and if the aircraft can reach to its destination without intermediate refueling (fuel price is different in different places specifically when flying abroad). Furthermore, unlike one comment above, aircraft fuel is much more expensive than car fuel. Hence, the long answer to your question is that how far distance is economical, depends on factors above.

Dear Daniel,

You first need to define what you mean by economical. Is it time? Is it cost? Is it fuel? Is it emissions?

I must agree with Dusan Stan, in that in the case of commercial aviation, airport security checks, boarding etc... take up so much time that you would need to travel a pretty large distance to amortize the time lost this way. In that sense general aviation from a small airport may be more time efficient for short distances as there may be less of a time over head.

However, if by efficiency you mean energy per passenger mile, then it will be hard to beat some of the large airliners with general aviation, given the economies of scale involved. This will pretty much apply at any distance.

You can find some of these answers and some numbers in this quite extensive document that is published every year by the US government's Oak Ridge National Lab: https://cta.ornl.gov/data/download36.shtml

Older version like the one attached contain complementary data and you would need to piece things together to get a full answer, but I think it helps.

Hi Danial,

If you want to working on Economical of General Aviation. You have to calculate cost of the time, image of there personnel or business that the professional business can be save/earn when compare with another type of transportation. Because the major reason why they used general aviation is not how much money they can save but it's about how much money they can earn from travel by that type of transportation.