Failing that, hang around your flight school and see if your instructor’s other students wouldn’t mind you tagging along for the ride.

Once you have completed your license, you could go flying with friends and share the costs. If they fly, you could split the flying time. If not, it’s all yours!

It’s much more about flying smartly and getting the most out of your money, whatever the amount available. It is not so easy to restrain or limit one’s flying, but there are cases where it’s the sole way to remain safe.

When I’m on restricted budget I take more instruction flights, and try to get trained or fly with a safety pilot at the limit of my comfort zone to keep it as wide as possible.

Do you have any tricks and tips for pilots on low budget ?

Within your group of rich people, there will be a personality range from very safe/sensible to completely reckless. A greater number of flying hours (because the reckless rich guy can afford it) will not make them a safer pilot.

Being a safe pilot is a combination of personality, experience, time and to a lesser extent, money. Look at your local flying instructors. I’m sure they’re not rich, but by and large I suspect that they are pretty safe.

Nice photographs by the way!

As opposed to the poor bugger who buys himself a $30K Warrior and because he’s retired has all the time in the world and picks only the best days to fly on?

You need money, time and sensibility. Just being rich is not going to make you any safer.

Time on the ground is cheap. Use it to know your aircraft systems inside-out, review emergency procedures and flight-plan thoroughly. It’s all very cheap and make you safer. If you have time to hang around your aeroclub or flying school on days when you’re not flying, there’s always something to learn, and you may even get a ride and learn something new just by watching things happen in the cockpit when someone else is flying. Having time also means you are more likely to delay or cancel a flight if the conditions are a bit marginal.

Unfortunately, time and money never seem to come together in life, except for a lucky few. You may start your adult life with plenty of time and little money for flying (while at uni for example), then get a job with more money but a lot less time for flying. Then you have to wait a long long time before you retire and have hopefully both enough time and money to indulge in flying often.