When business fell off for Jack Horn’s construction company in the Denver area, his general aviation airplane made it possible for him to commute to a new job in Hobbs, N.M.

Traveling by airline was not at all efficient, Horn said. He faced a 30-minute drive from his home in Erie, Colo., to Denver’s airline airport. He’d spend a couple hours at the airport before departing on the hour-and-a-half flight to Albuquerque, N.M,—“then you have to spend the night in a hotel,” he said. That’s because the next leg of the journey was a shuttle to Hobbs. “Unfortunately, that [Cessna] Caravan only flies out once a day, and it leaves at 5 a.m.” Other alternatives included a 10.5-hour drive, or a flight to El Paso, Texas, followed by a three-hour drive to Hobbs.

“With my Cessna 210, we make it in three hours, door to door,” he said. “You can’t get there from here, short of GA.”

But Horn found a better solution. He departs Erie Municipal Airport in his GA airplane, takes up a south-southeasterly heading, and flies the 448 nautical miles to Lea County Regional Airport in Hobbs nonstop. “With my Cessna 210, we make it in three hours, door to door,” he said. “You can’t get there from here, short of GA.”

Although Horn eventually sold his business in Denver, he and his wife, Marcia, want to keep their home in Colorado. “Down here in New Mexico there is quite a bit going on with uranium enrichment—there’s a brand-new facility going in,” he explained, and lots of oil development that’s also driving residential development. “Hobbs is small enough that it’s able to keep reasonably busy,” Horn said about the town of 35,000.

He has been commuting by Cessna between Erie and Hobbs for about two years. “I run serious lean of peak, pull back on the throttle, and add about 15 minutes to the flight,” he said, which shaves a lot of money from his fuel bill.

Lately, Horn hasn’t been commuting as much. “I was running back and forth quite a bit, but since then my wife has moved here with me,” he said. “She’s down here helping me. We still have our home in Erie.”

Both of the Horns are instrument-rated private pilots. “My wife and I learned to fly in 1981,” he said. “We learned to fly together in an Aeronca Champ. For the first five years it was just for pleasure.”

Then the Horns began to fly themselves to check on construction projects, or to look at equipment they wanted to buy. Business travel accounted for 10- to 20 percent of their flying time. “Now it’s like 90 percent of our flying is commuting and 10 percent of it is for pleasure.” Their pleasure flying is mostly to visit family. “We don’t have a lot of time anymore—and we get plenty of flying in as it is,” Horn laughed.—By Mike Collins