Which airplane does your trip?
Tell it where you go and who comes with you. It tells you what can carry that load that far — and what misses, by how much.
Almost every disappointing airplane purchase is the same mistake: the buyer shopped on cruise speed and seat count, and discovered afterwards that filling the seats meant leaving the fuel behind. A four-place airplane is very often a two-adults-and-bags airplane once it has enough fuel to go anywhere.
So start from the trip instead. Put in the flight you would actually make a dozen times a year, with the people who would actually be aboard, and let the wing tell you which airplanes are honestly in the running.
The trip you actually take
Not the dream trip. The one you would fly a dozen times a year — that is the trip the airplane has to do well.
Who and what is coming
Real weights. Every airplane that disappointed an owner did so because the brochure counted seats and the wing counted pounds.
What you will consider
Widen this if nothing fits. Narrow it if everything does.
Pick both airports and the short list appears here.
This is a filter, not a flight plan. It uses still air, a single cruise setting, a 45-minute reserve and a conservative useful load, and it ignores climb, wind, terrain, weather and every runway involved. Its one job is to turn thirty airplanes into three worth researching properly. Nothing here is a substitute for the POH, and no airplane should be bought on the strength of a web page.
Working figures: the performance numbers behind this tool are typical published values that have not yet been checked against the POH for each type. Treat every result as indicative until that check is done.
The airplanes that miss are the useful ones
A short list of what fits is worth something. A list of what misses, and by how much, is worth more — because the misses are where the trade-offs live. An airplane that is 90 lb over on your normal load is a different conversation from one that is 600 lb over. The first is solved by leaving a bag at home or planning a fuel stop. The second means that type is simply not your airplane.
Watch the cabin left over figure on the ones that fit. Anything under about 150 lb of margin is a fair-weather answer: a headwind, a full fuel load or one more passenger turns it into a fuel stop. Buyers who ignore that margin are the ones who sell two years later saying the airplane was smaller than they thought.
Once you know what can do the trip, the question becomes what it costs to keep one — and whether you should own it alone.
Rent, club, partner or own?