I don’t have my own glider (yet?) so I use the club high performance single-seaters, the Pegase and Discus.
In March each year, we have the option of buying shares in a virtual syndicate which runs these gliders.
So, I’m doing a lot of soul-searching to decide whether to buy one, two, or three shares.
If I buy one share:
- I pre-pay for 14 hours of flying.
- I fly for an effective rate of 47p per minute.
- Beyond the 14 hours, I can still fly but it gets more expensive.
If I buy two shares:
- I pre-pay for 28 hours of flying.
- I fly for only 39p per minute.
- Beyond the 28 hours, I can still fly but it gets more expensive.
If I buy three shares, I can fly as much as I want with no additional charges, so flying is, err, free? That’s how maths works, right?
In comparison, phoning Albania from a BT landline is 169p per minute, so don’t do that. Go gliding instead!
The effective flying rates may be cheaper than that – if I manage to stay up for more than 2 hours 45 minutes, flying is free. On the other hand, launches add to these costs.
So what should I do? Clearly the rational sensible decision is to buy one share, and then if I happen to manage more than 14 hours of flying, I’ll be happy anyway, so I won’t regret the fact that flying gets more expensive after that point.
But, obviously, I got talked into pre-paying for 28 hours of flying, thus putting lots of pressure on me to stay in the air a lot this summer. Fingers crossed for the thermals.
I’ll report back next March to let you know how bad a decision this was.
