I enjoyed a nice free lunch yesterday given by an aircraft company so confident of its design that it attaches a parachute to each and every model it produces.

  I personally have nothing against the concept of surviving an engine-out or other in-flight emergency but I have always been a little skeptical of an airplane having its own parachute. I am probably wrong and old fashioned in my discomfort – even Cessna Aircraft has recently announced that they will be attaching chutes to their single engine line.

  The company in question – who, by the way, bought me and the fifteen or so other people who attended a very nice lunch followed by a very soft sell – are basing their marketing efforts on proving that their aircraft isn’t really an airplane so much as it is a luxury car. They even place mock-ups and actual airplanes at luxury car dealerships so the public can see and touch them.

  On one level this is pure genius because it sells to the people who really have enough money to spend five hundred grand on a single. There are a whole lot more non-pilots out there with money than there are pilots and this company is selling to non pilots. Part of the deal with your new airplane is a full-time professional eagle of the skies of your very own – for only $70 grand per year. (that’s right folks, I wrote $70 grand…)

  Again, I am probably just being old-fashioned about this, but I want my airplane to be an airplane, not a car. I am personally sick to the teeth of cars. I am tired of dealing with cars, insuring cars, hitting other cars, paying to park cars and filling cars with gas. When I fly, I want to fly, not drive.

  Why does every mode of transportation try to mimic the last in order to be successful? The car started out as the “horseless carriage” and the first cross-ocean steam ships still had masts for sails.

  I hope the company in question sells a million new cars…er, airplanes and that none of them need to literally bail out on themselves, but as flashy as they are with their TV screens and whatnot, I’ll take a steam gauged sputtering tail dragger that has adverse yaw out the wazoo any day over a glorified Yugo with wings.