When I was in Knoxville last month, I checked out two of the local flying clubs. Knoxville Flyers has about 250-members and three planes, and is based at DKX, the Downtown Airport. Sky Ranch only has something like 100 members and two airplanes, and they have their own private grass strip on an island in the river that passes through Knoxville.

Between the two, I had pretty much decided on Sky Ranch. The initiation fee was a little cheaper ($225 vs $350 for Knox Flyers), and the monthly fee was cheaper too ($35 vs $56). Their hourly rates were a little more expensive ($50/hr for the Cessna 150 and $70/hr for the Cessna 172, vs $46/hr and $68/hr respectively at Knox Flyers), but pretty close overall. Both clubs have the policy that if you take an airplane on a trip, you need to pay at least two hours' worth of rental fees for each day the plane is gone, whether you actually flew it that day or not. That policy is what would make trips unfeasible — at $50/hr, the plane rental for a round trip flight to Clemson (one hour each way) would only cost $100, but if I went for a week I'd end up having to pay for 2 x 7 = 14 hours' worth, so the trip would cost $700 instead of $100. But it still seemed like the best option around.

There was a third club in the area, The Flying 64th, but I didn't spend much time looking into it because the initiation fee is $1000, much higher than the $225-350 of the other clubs. Of course, in the case of The Flying 64th, you're actually buying a share of the club, and you can sell that share to someone else when you leave, so it's not really a fee so much as a deposit or an investment. But regardless, $1000 was a bit much to drop at once, so I disregarded the club in my search.

When I actually moved here, though, it turned out that my landlord, Mike Matvy, is also a pilot, and what's more, he happens to be the vice president of The Flying 64th. I spent some time talking with him about the club, and the more I heard about it, the more I started to think it might actually be the best option for me.

As far as rates go, they're sort of the best of both worlds. The monthly dues are $40, and the hourly rates are $44/hr for the Cessna 150 and $60/hr for the 172. What's more, they charge based on tach time (clock runs slower when the engine is at lower RPMs) rather than the more common Hobbs time (a simple counter of how long the engine was on, regardless of how fast it was running). Tach time generally ends up being roughly 20% lower than Hobbs time, so in effect the rates end up being something like $39/hr and $55/hr, respectively.

But more important than the cheaper rates is the availability of the airplanes. While they also have two planes, they keep their membership much smaller — they have only 30 members, so the ratio of members to airplanes is much lower. The planes only get flown about 6 hours a month, so most of the time they're just sitting there waiting to be flown. Because of that, the club has no minimum daily rental policy — you can take a plane for a week and pay only for the time it was in the air.

The Flying 64th also has a private grass strip, though theirs isn't lighted like Sky Ranch's, so it can't be used at night. Still, if you ever get delayed and make it back to Knoxville after dark, there's no problem with landing at one of the other airports for the night and then hopping back over to the home field the next day, so that's only a minor limitation.

With all that information in hand, I arranged to go out to Flying 64th's airport to have a look at the airplanes and field. I wondered if the club's planes would look shoddy and poorly-maintained, since they see so little use, but they actually looked pretty good. They don't have the fancy expensive amenities like GPS that the other clubs had, but I purposely made sure during my training that I was comfortable navigating without the use of GPS, specifically because I figured the club I ended up joining might not have them in their planes. I'll certainly miss the convenience of glancing at a screen to be able to tell Air Traffic Control exactly how far I am from the airport, but aside from that I never really used the GPSes in my training airplanes anyway, so it won't be a great loss to fly without them.

You can tell that the people who fly out of that airport share my interest in older, smaller planes — walking down the row of hangars, you see a bunch of Citabrias (aerobatic-rated taildraggers), ultralights, and light sport taildraggers. Clearly these people foster a love of flying similar to my own.

So I submitted my application, the members all voted on it, and I received notice that it was approved yesterday. Now I have to fly back down to Puerto Rico for another week for work, but once I get back I can schedule some time with one of the club's instructors to get checked out in the club's planes, and then I can start winging my way around the country for little more than the cost of driving. I can't wait.