A lot of people hear or read "plane" and assume like a million dollars. You can quite literally buy a single prop piston engine small plane for less than $100k USD. Yearly cost to maintain can be as little as a few thousand if flights hours are low.

[–] FlexibleToast@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

You can get a Cessna 172 or even some nice Mooneys for around $50k. Unlike cars, even really old ones are kept in good running order because parts time out and have to be regularly maintained. Even if you want to buy a newer plane, a lot of people in GA use fractional ownership. That $200k newish Cirrus SR22 is fairly likely owned by 4 people splitting the bill. GA isn't cheap by any measure, but it also isn't exclusively for the wealthy. Upper middle class can get into it without too much issue. The people we should be raising everyone to, not tearing down.