Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

My turbine-crazed friends and I did a test flight in a King Air 200 today.  David is a magnet for miserable weather and every time we fly together the clouds are spread over the airport with winds gusting to 30 knots (fairness compels me to note that he accuses ME of being the bad weather magnet).  Today was no exception:  clouds, cold, wind gusting over 30 knots, snow showers, wind shear advisories.

If you’re going to fly in miserable weather, the King Air isn’t a bad choice.  The plane is famously immune to icing, rough runways, pilot incompetence, and mechanical woes.  The plane has two big jet engines turning 4-blade props that spin at 1500-1900 rpm.  Cabin size is slightly smaller than a Pilatus PC-12 and the King Air lacks the huge door that enables bulky cargo (and obese passengers?) to be forklifted into the plane.  If you do have a lot of fat friends, it is comforting to know that the plane, designated C-12F, is regularly operated by the U.S. military at 15,000 lbs; the civilian model has a gross weight of 12,500 lbs., coincidentally the maximum weight aircraft that may be legally flown without a type rating.  Cruise speed, range, and payload are similar to the PC-12.  Construction quality is superb, as is the cabin fit and finish, at least on a par with the Pilatus.  The pilot seat is more adjustable and comfortable than the seat in the PC-12.  Once seated, you’re surrounded by Collins Pro Line 21 avionics, the same glass panels that are in mid-sized business jets and very similar to what is in Boeing airliners.  The Pilatus, by contrast, comes with the same radios as the Diamond Katana two-seat plastic trainer.  I immediately fell in love with the user interface, presentation, and capabilities of the Collins system, which were vastly better than anything that I’ve ever flown before.  [God help you after the five-year warranty runs out and you have to replace one of those puppies at airliner prices.]

Taxiing the King Air is simple, much easier for a beginner than the Twin Commander.  Takeoff is straightforward except that the pilot is 100 percent responsible for watching engine torques and temperatures.  You rotate at 100 knots, enter the clouds, and if you’ve pushed the power levers too far forward a couple of small gauges off to the right will start flashing.  The consequences of overtorquing a free turbine such as on the King Air are much smaller than the direct-drive engines on the Twin Commander, which is presumably why Beech didn’t bother with automated systems to limit power automatically.

The King Air is extremely stable and it was easy to hold the plane in a reasonable attitude despite moderate turbulence.  I felt no urge to engage the autopilot and was able to keep the plane on heading and altitude more easily than the similar weight Twin Commander that I’ve been flying (on the downside, the King Air felt less nimble).  Interior noise is as low as 78 dBA in some parts of the airplane during some phases of flight and as high as 88 dBA.  Generally speaking, interior noise was 81-85 dBA, similar to the Twin Commander, but inferior to the turbojets that people have been buying instead of the King Air.  Sitting in the back while others flew, my stomach did not enjoy the side-to-side yaw from all of the bumps.

Our friend David, with 600 hours and no multi-engine rating, was given a simulated engine failure.  The King Air has an autofeather system; if an engine quits, the prop automatically feathers to a low-drag angle.  He handled the resultant yaw with ease, keeping the airplane straight with rudder.  An engine failure in a twin turbine airplane is much easier to manage than in a twin-engine piston.

Landing wasn’t all that easy with a gusty 30 knot wind at a significant angle to the runway, but it wasn’t all that difficult either; 120 knots down the glideslope slowing to 100-110 over the numbers.  Despite the supposed power lag with a free turbine, I found the airplane to be approximately as responsive to power changes as the Twin Commander, which is a similar weight.  The switch and systems complexity didn’t seem substantially greater than in the Pilatus or TBM-700.  A lower time but serious pilot could be trained to operate this plane safely and the insurance companies seem to agree, having quoted similar rates and training requirements for my 600-hour friend in the Pilatus and King Air.

Operating cost on a King Air is higher than on the Pilatus due to spinning two engines.  The fuel burn is 100 gallons per hour instead of 70-75.  Is the difference worth it?  If you’re over the North Atlantic and one of those engines suffers a loss of oil pressure, very likely!

What does the Pilatus do better?  Short runways.  The Pilatus flies and lands so slowly that pilots experienced with both seem to be comfortable with 30 percent less runway.  Unless the approaches were completely flat, you probably wouldn’t take a King Air 200 into an airport shorter than 3000′.

[Second opinions:  Our Boeing 767 pilot friend thought the plane was vastly superior to the Pilatus.  The 600-hour pilot thought it was harder to control than the Pilatus (I reserve judgement on this one because we flew the planes under such different weather conditions).]

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Here’s what I wrote at Amazon about my T-Mobile Sidekick:

The good: Full-time connectivity with AOL Instant Messenger, useful if you’re working with a team of folks who also use AIM.

The physical design: Sort of nice, but it should be a flip-phone like the original Treo. Despite being careful to use the key lock, the phone made at least one call per day that I did not intend.

Voice quality: About 30 percent of people on the other end of the line complained that they heard a bad echo. This went away when I selected speakerphone mode, so it was a problem with the device and not the T-Mobile service.

Web browsing: Very slow and the browser isn’t recognized by sites such as Google as coming from a small screen, so you get the large screen versions of every site. The browser can’t handle Javascript, so some newer sites aren’t usable (admittedly this is more a statement about how bad today’s Web developers are). When I swapped this for a T-Mobile MDA (Windows-based phone), the Web browsing speed went up despite the fact that it was using the same network.

Overall User Interface: Poorly conceived. There are two ways to get to the address book. One is from the “phone” menu and one is from “address book”. If you get to a contact from the phone menu, you can’t see the mailing address, email address, or any other info. If you get to a contact from the address book menu, it is possible to call one of the phone numbers but the option is buried deep in a menu and there is no shortcut. The Windows-based phones handle this much better. Where a Windows-based phone gives you a welcome screen showing events for today, new messages, todos, etc., you’d have to hunt among many different screens on the Sidekick to get this info.

Syncing with the Internet: The idea of the Sidekick is a great one; have all of the information on a Web site and the phone keeps itself sync’d up with the site. Sadly, the Web applications aren’t the most powerful and they are cumbersome to use. You can’t leave yourself logged in from your desktop computer to the calendar or address book. If you want to look up an address from your home computer, you’ll have to go to the T-Mobile Web site to log in and then click a few more times to get to the Sidekick desktop. If you’ve kept a lot of information in Outlook over the years, you’ll find that much has been truncated after export/import to Sidekick. An Outlook note associated with a contact, for example, can be much longer than the corresponding field with Sidekick.

Basic Functions: There is no calculator that I could find. A Windows-based phone would give you a whole spreadsheet AND a calculator.

I hate to be a shill for Microsoft and I don’t think it would be that hard to make something better than Windows Mobile, but the Sidekick is not it.

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The new phone is the T-Mobile MDA.  It is not a flip-phone like my old dead Motorola Windows-based phone, but it has a full QWERTY keyboard and the charging connector isn’t broken yet.  The newest versions of the Windows phone OS seems to have some improved features, e.g., you can sync Notes from Microsoft Outlook.  The new phone has voice dialing, which I appreciate.

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New England is one of the nation’s most miserably windy areas.  Boston is far windier on average than Chicago, for example.  The prevailing winds tend to be from the northwest.  Logan Airport has parallel runways in every orientation except northwest.  When the wind is really blowing from the northwest, therefore, flights start backing up at Logan, all forced to use Runway 33.  More than 30 years ago, some bright administrator at Massport decided that building a 5000′ (short by jet standards) commuter airline runway 14/32 (oriented towards magnetic heading 320 in one direction, i.e., facing a northwest wind).  This led to a big fight by neighborhood and environmental groups, a court injunction in 1976, a lifting of the injunction in 2003, and the runway opening last week (new airport diagram).

In the same amount of time that it took Los Angeles to add millions of jobs, India and China to grow their way out of abject poverty, and the microprocessor to grow from infancy to 3 billion instructions per second… we here in Boston managed to build one runway facing the wind…

[Logan was in the news about a month ago as well.  Massport tried to prevent Continental from providing wireless Internet in its lounge, fearing that it would cut down on the number of people who fork over $8/day (down from $10) to Massport for the privilege of using Internet while trapped at Logan (and already paying substantial passenger fees to Massport rolled into their ticket price and Continental, of course, was paying high rent for the lounge space).  The FCC rained on Massport’s parade, citing rules that prevent landlords from electronically imprisoning tenants.]

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To round out my spate of airplane reviews… I made a couple of noise measurements today in the Twin Commander on the way back from Portland, Maine.  This is truly a pilot’s airplane.  At 10,000′ and 200 knots, the front seats were 81-82 dBA and the rear seats, which are closer to the props, were at 85 dBA.  The owner reports that the sound levels are considerably less at higher altitudes and were reduced in this airplane by “super soundproofing” when the interior was redone.

[I’m now up to about 10 hours of multi-engine turbine time and also picked up my Airline Transport Pilot certificate earlier in the week, doing a checkride in the Cirrus SR20.  Goals for the next few months:  ATP multi-engine, multi-engine instructor, helicopter instrument/ATP and helicopter instrument instructor.]

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My friend David and I went up to Manchester, New Hampshire the other day to test-fly the Pilatus PC-12.  This is a competitor to the TBM 850 that I tested a couple of weeks ago.  The PC-12 has a much bigger cabin, a small closable toilet opposite the front stairs, and turned out to be much quieter.  It is more expensive than the TBM and significantly slower, but if you can afford $2.8 million you can probably afford $3.5 million and, “If you’re important, people will wait for you.”

The Pilatus has a profusion of switches, but David said that he thought they were more logically laid out compared to the TBM.  The fundamental instruments are 5″ glass tubes.  In 2008 the company will be shipping a revised PC-12 with a simplified panel and a three-screen glass set of flight instruments (the new design also has a higher cruise speed).

Handling of the airplane is very consistent from 90 knots right up to maximum cruising speed.  The controls never felt sloppy during slow flight and the plane can fly very slow indeed.  The FAA won’t certify a single-engine plane unless it can fly right down to about 70 mph.  The theory is that if the engine quits and you need to land in a potato field, you shouldn’t be zipping along at 100 mph where an impact with a ground obstacle would be fatal.  The requirement that a single-engine plane be able to fly slow means that the PC-12 can land on very short runways (less distance required to brake from 70 mph than 100 mph) and can be safely operated by less experienced pilots.

Fit and finish throughout the airplane were superb, visibly superior to the TBM.  This is not necessarily a tribute to Swiss craftsmanship because the interior is done in Colorado.  I had to bend forward a bit to see through the windows and standing up in the cabin is not an option for those over maybe 4’6″ tall.  Interior noise is obtrusive at low altitudes and while climbing, but abates in the 13,000′ cruise to 85 dBA in the pilot seats and closer to 81 in the back (supposedly quieter at higher altitudes).  An optional sound insulation package would bring the noise level down by 3-6 dBA at the cost of 175 lbs. in payload. Of course, after paying $42,000 for this option, you probably won’t have as much stuff or as many friends to haul around…  Options are priced at 100-400X what you’d pay for the same thing at Walmart.  A microwave is $20,000; a coffee maker is $7,000; a DVD player for the folks in back is $12,000.  Tell your friends to bring a novel from the library and a thermos.

Resale value of the PC-12 should be less affected than the TBM by the flood of very light jets (VLJs) hitting the market.  The typical VLJ can only hold 2-4 people in anything that might be called comfort or for any distance that you couldn’t drive in four hours in a Ford Pinto.  A PC-12, by contrast, can haul a huge amount of cargo or two families with kids all the way down to Florida.  The plane also handles ice very well and consequently is in extremely high demand over in Russia.  If U.S. yuppies eventually decide that they need to ride in turbojets, a PC-12 can be unloaded in two weeks to a happy Russian customer.

Conclusion:  A great step-up plane for guys like David, who has 600 hours, is planning to fly about once/week to remain current, and who plans one day to fly a twin-engine jet.  It is a shame that the market isn’t large enough to support mass production of planes like this and therefore there aren’t significant economies of scale bringing the price down.  Pilatus builds only about 100 per year and if you don’t have a spare $2.8 million kicking around, it is tough even to find an old one.

Related: TBM 850 quick review

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Would appreciate comments (here or email to philg@mit.edu) on a draft of a new page:  Helicopter Training.

The goal is to answer new students’ questions.

Thanks.

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A friend of mine who frequently travels to Africa lent me a copy of The End of Poverty, a popular economics book by Jeffrey Sachs.  Sachs’s thesis is that if we come up with $250 billion/year to hand over to the poorest of the world’s poor, mostly in Africa, that they will be able to invest and grow their way out of extreme poverty.

In the first half of the book, we follow Sachs around the world as he works with top officials to accomplish heroic deeds of currency stabilization in Bolivia, Poland, and other countries.  The second half of the book lays out Sachs’s thesis that it is an obligation of rich countries to supply enough aid to solve worldwide poverty and that a solution is practical.

Sachs proceeds from the assumption that every human being on the planet, in virtue of having been born, has a fundamental right to clean water, food, clothing, housing, health care and education, even if neither he nor his parents ever make any attempt to work.  He then says that if we ensure that everyone on the planet has all of these things, they will naturally save enough, and therefore invest enough, to grow their local economies.  He notes with dismay that most rich countries have given up on aid to the extreme poor, saying “trade not aid” and generally pinching pennies.

One reason this 396-page book isn’t more convincing is that Sachs cannot come up with a single example of a country that has been lifted out of poverty by foreign aid.  He talks about saving Russia with financial engineering, but Russia’s clever people were making jet fighters, atomic bombs, and helicopters long before they ever met Sachs.  He talks about the Marshall Plan for post-WWII Germany, but Germany didn’t suffer from overpopulation and the lack of education that plague modern poor countries; investing in folks that had conquered France in six weeks probably did not seem very risky, particularly when one aim was to build up Germany’s power as a bulwark against the Soviets.

Sachs tries to address some of his critics.  People going back as far as Malthus have argued that if you provide a human population with extra food and other resources, they will tend to have more children until the new food supply is exhausted.  Sachs just says that this isn’t so and cites countries that have had falling birthrates as their economies have developed.  One flaw in this argument is that the falling birthrates are in countries that have developed through internal efforts, not through inputs from foreigners.  There are actually a few places on this Earth where people have an guaranteed right to all of the things that Sachs believes are universal human rights, even if they do no work, and with the resources coming from some source other than work.  One is Saudi Arabia.  The money comes up out of the ground, a gift from the dinosaurs and Western oil company technology.  A citizen of Saudi Arabia need only be born in order to tap into a reasonable comfortable lifestyle.  What’s the population growth rate?  At least 3%, with the average woman having close to 6 children (source).  The Palestinians are in a similar situation, though the money mostly comes from the U.N., the U.S., and the European Union (i.e., from taxpayers in Western countries).  They have a population growth rate of 3.5%, one of the highest in the world (the worldwide average is 1.2% growth).  Sachs fails to note that the experiment of giving a not-necessarily-working human population the universal rights that he posits has actually been done in at least a few places and the result is a lot of kids.

The most serious flaw with the book, in my opinion, is that Sachs fails to devote even one sentence to the modern fact that labor is mobile and global.  Transportation and communication costs fall every decade.  An ambitious, hard-working, intelligent, and well-educated person has never had an easier time moving from a poor country to a rich country.  This has been a serious problem in African health care, according to Paul Theroux.  If an African achieves the standards of a First World nurse, he or she can easily emigrate to Europe or the U.K. where such skills are in high demand.  The emigre enjoys a much more comfortable lifestyle in the rich country, can make free voice calls to friends and family back in Africa, and can fly home in 8 hours on a discount airline.  Educated and productive people are the biggest assets of most countries and, more so than ever, they can simply choose to walk away.  Sachs talks about building medical schools in Africa so that doctors and nurses will be plentiful, not noting that the U.S. has jobs for perhaps 200,000 more doctors than U.S. medical schools are going to graduate in the next decade or so (source).  If Sachs is going to pay doctors in poor countries a U.S. doctor’s salary, his program to deliver high quality health care to every poor person is going to cost a lot more $250 billion/year.  If he isn’t going to pay a competitive salary, why wouldn’t these smart educated folks simply emigrate to where the good jobs are?

In a modern world, a surprising percent of economic growth is generated by a comparative handful of people.  Before film, there were a lot of stage actors, the range of audience members reached by each one was relatively narrow and consequently their salaries fell into a relatively narrow band.  Before television, the earnings of professional athletes were inconsequential.  Harvard and MIT would like you to believe that it is a small number of their graduates that have kept Massachusetts humming while other rust belt states have collapsed economically (compare Boston to Buffalo).  The percentage of Americans who’ve gone to Harvard or MIT and then founded a company is much smaller than the percentage of people who have elected to emigrate from very poor countries.  Sachs never asks “What if the people who have left and are leaving are the ones who would have generated the economic growth?”

Sachs provides some convincing answers to the question of “Why are some countries so rich and some so poor?” He has apparently managed to convince some of the world’s truly rich, e.g., Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, to pony up much of the necessary dough to fund his answer to the question “What should we do to eliminate poverty?”.  I don’t think that his plea for more $$ from taxpayers will prove convincing to politicians or the average taxpayer unless and until he takes one country and applies the full Sachs treatment:  $1/day in walking around money for every person, roads constructed, medical schools built, anti-malaria tools delivered (e.g., bed nets), etc.  If that country gets on the road to sustained growth and off the dole, I would expect the middle class taxpayers in developed countries to open their purses and try to repeat that success with the remainder.

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My Motorola/Windows XP phone began to die after two years.  Wanting something that would let me keep in touch with friends over AOL Instant Messenger, I got a T-Mobile Sidekick.  I was reluctant to get a non-flip phone, but so far I have only managed to make one unintended phone call per day.  The Web browser is excruciatingly slow.  I’ve found that most of the Web sites developed in the early 1990s work just fine.  It is possible to log in, fill out forms, get results.  What doesn’t work?  The latest and greatest Web sites.  They are too script-heavy.  Programmers seem to have forgotten that although the average desktop has ever-greater capabilities, the average user is increasingly connecting from a handheld device.  I tried using one of my students’ sites from last semester.  They lifted some username/password code from a Ruby on Rails toolkit.  It relies on JavaScript.  The site is 100 percent useless from the Sidekick.

Have we proven that “the better the tools the worse the application?”

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In Shopgirl, the book, the leading male character is a retired computer programmer.  The Hollywood experts decided that the American public couldn’t possibly care about the barren inner life of a computer programmer and the source of the character’s wealth is obscured as well as his occupation.  In Shopgirl, the movie, which we watched the other night on DVD, the nerd has been transformed into a “logician”.

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What do three pilots do for fun on a Saturday night?  Fly to Nantucket for dinner.  We were apparently in a hurry, because we opted to take a Twin Commander 1000.  In the 1970s, corporate managers thought it would be the height of luxury to ride in the back of a plane that could seat 8 people, cruised at 300 knots up to 35,000′, with a range of 1800 nautical miles (good to go to Europe with a stop in Iceland).  The typical number of passengers carried on a private jet, then and now, is less than 2.  In response to this demand, Gulfstream manufactured the Twin Command from around 1973 through 1985.  Corporate managers, having figured out that there was nothing to stop them looting an extra $50-100 million from their shareholders, abandoned these planes for bizjets closer in size to a Boeing 737 and Gulfstream followed that market, leaving the Twin Commanders mostly to private owners.

We walked out of Jet Aviation in Bedford around 5:30 pm.  The interior of the Twin Commander is cavernous by general aviation standards.  Four people would have plenty of room to stretch out in the back all the way to Europe; six or seven would be comfortable on a trip to D.C.  Starting the plane’s Garrett direct-drive turbine engines is more or less automatic.  Taxiing the plane is famously difficult and the copilot’s seat has limited rearward travel due to a cabinet.  My shins were up against a sharp metal piece of the panel and it was hard to work the rudder pedals and toe brakes.  Winds were less than 10 knots and more or less straight down Runway 23, the 5000′ crosswind runway at Hanscom.  I advanced the throttles to about 80 percent torque and, with about 1400 horsepower on tap, we hurtled down the runway towards a rotation speed of 100 knots.  Rotating the Twin Commander requires a heroic tug back on the yoke that would flip a Cessna over on its back.  We probably weighed close to 11,000 lbs. and with a plane that heavy, you have to be alert with the trim.  Fortunately, thanks to the twin-engine nature of the beast, there were no issues with left-turning tendencies.  I was instructed to climb at 120 knots, but was holding closer to 140 and still we were climbing at closer to 1000 fpm.

We contacted Boston Approach and were quickly cleared through the Class Bravo airspace to an altitude of 10,500′.  I was “behind the airplane” at all times, just barely able to keep up with attitude, heading, airspeed, and power, while the owner worked the radio.  The workload was high, but seemed like it could be manageable.  Like the 2006 TBM-700 that I had flown the day before, this 1982 Twin Commander does not offer much integration of information.  There are about the same number of switches, dials, and lights as in the TBM.

The weather was severe clear, but it was pitch black and we were over the water.  Between the lack of visual references and the limited visibility over the high panel, I found it easier to fly the instruments than the real horizon.  Removing headsets, it was remarkably quiet in the cabin, which had been passively soundproofed the last time that the interior was refurbished.  It wasn’t that hard to slow the plane down for a 120-knot approach speed on a right base to Runway 24 at KACK.  With the gear and full flaps down, we crossed over the threshold at 110 knots and touched down at close to 100 knots (the stall speed in this configuration is 77 knots).  The specs say that the plane can be landed in 1300′ with reverse thrust, which we did use; we probably chewed up 3500′ of runway (out of 6000′ available).

Over some cod cakes (the Nantucket equivalent of hamburger), we talked about airplanes and children (the good pilots tend to be successful husbands and fathers as well).  I almost always feel good after hanging out with pilots, but these guys were especially impressive for the level of responsibility they are willing to take for their passengers’ safety and also, in the Twin Commander owner’s case, for the level of flying skill evidenced.

We headed back to the airport and fired up.  The weather was beginning to come down in the Boston area.  We departed VFR and contacted Cape Approach to ask for VFR advisories into Bedford.  The controller seemed confused, never got our tail number right, and kept asking us to press the Ident button on the transponder.  Finally he said that we were out of his airspace and to talk to someone else, but he didn’t give us a frequency.  We used the “nearest center” function on the Garmin 530 to bring up the frequency for Boston Center, the controllers of higher altitude aircraft.  A sharp-minded woman answered and gave us an instrument clearance to return to Bedford at 12,000′.  At almost 270 miles per hour over the ground, I was just getting organized when it was time to descend towards Bedford.  The wind was about 6 knots right down Runway 23 and the controllers were proposing a non-precision VOR approach to 23.  That would have involved a bit of extra flying to the NE side of the airport and it is safer and easier to fly an instrument landing system (ILS) approach, so we asked for the ILS 29 instead.  We entered the clouds at around 7000′ and kept getting closer to the final approach fix without getting clearance to a lower altitude.  Finally we were cleared down to 2000′ and we pulled the power back to idle and nosed over for a 3000 fpm descent.  To my piston instincts, it felt wrong to be hurtling towards the ground so fast, but because the Twin Commander is pressurized, I didn’t feel anything in my ears.  We slowed down to 120 knots and dropped the gear as we intercepted the glide slope.  The ILS was uneventful and we broke out at 1300′, about 1200′ above the runway, then continued visually to land.  Despite cutting the power and aiming just beynd the numbers of 29 rather than for the 1000′ markers, our touchdown speed of close to 100 knots kept us moving all the way to the intersection with Runway 23, i.e., we used about 4000′ out of the 7000′ runway.   It was easy to keep the plane straight against the light crosswind.

This is a great airplane that is beyond my current level of piloting skill, but the owner, a Twin Commander expert, thought that I would be able to fly it safely by myself in reasonably good weather after 25 hours of flying as a copilot.  It is quiet and comfortable in the back, good enough for anyone not spoiled by a Gulfstream GV or Boeing Business Jet.  It has the speed and range to go anywhere in the world.

What are the practical aspects of owning a Twin Commander?  $1-2 million to buy.  100 gallons of jet fuel per hour (approx. $400) plus maybe another $500 per hour for maintenance.  Insurance would probably be $40,000 per year.  Better to take JetBlue if you want to go somewhere obvious like San Francisco or Los Angeles…

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