Preface

I wrote this thing after a year dealing with issues with my old Peugeot 407. This exercise served me as a way to vent about the issues of owning a shitty car.

To be fair, the previous owner had used it mostly on the coast, which is specially hard on vehicles due to humidity, heat and salt.

As a result, I suffered that year of ownership several faults, some even while driving the vehicle. It is a miracle I am still alive or have not killed someone.

After this experience, I became really disillusioned with car ownership and cars in general. I began to look them as large, ugly and dirty mastodons of an old era of cheap fossil fuels.

At the time I thought it would be funny to challenge the logic involved on car ownership by comparing it to the fact of owning an Apache Attack helicopter.

Now I understand that I was simply victim of a mixture of bad luck and poor wisdom regarding cars. If you are willing to buy an asset such as a vehicle, a home or anything else, you must understand that you are also adquiring the responsibilities involved.

Enjoy.

Helicopter ownership

The wikipedia describes an Apache attack helicopter as the following:

The Boeing AH-64 Apache is an American twin-turboshaft attack
helicopter with a tailwheel-type landing gear arrangement and a
tandem cockpit for a crew of two.

It features a nose-mounted sensor suite for target acquisition
and night vision systems.

It is armed with a 30 mm (1.18 in) M230 chain gun carried between
the main landing gear, under the aircraft's forward fuselage, and
four hardpoints mounted on stub-wing pylons for carrying armament
and stores, typically a mixture of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and
Hydra 70 rocket pods.

The AH-64 has significant systems redundancy to improve combat
survivability.

As you can see, this is a pretty badass machine. It is a vehicle of power that leaves a trail of destruction on its path. The one thing every man needs to feel a man, an icon of freedom, masculinity and basedness.

Let say you have the opportunity to adquire one of these.

After paying the couple tens of millions of dollars that it costs, probably financed by great levels of debt as the american government does, you will find yourself having the set of problems that come with ownership of this device.

First of all, you will need somewhere to keep it.

Yeah, you could keep it on the street, probably near your residence, but depending where you live this will expose the vehicle to a large set of natural elements. These range from high temperatures and ultraviolet radiation in the summer, to lots of rain in the fall, extreme cold on winter, and organic material in the spring. Of course, there is this highly reactive thing in the air called oxygen, which seems to break down everything around us.

All seasons of the year conspire against the materials of your vehicle to tear it down and decompose it back into nature.

This is without taking into account the range of possibilities that emerge when the human element and the socioeconomic implications of stealing your device involves.

This means that you will need an hangar for the Apache thing. This will provide some level of access control to the vehicle given that it is essentially a box with a big ass door that can have one or several locks, as well as protection against the elements.

The next issue is where to have this hangar.

Such a large space will either be found in abundance on rural areas or carving away the little space available within a urbanized location at a great cost.

This might involve some inconvenient access to the vehicle, given that now you actually need to move around in order to reach it from your usual dwelling. This sucks but is still manageable. At a greater societal scale you might want to design houses and do urban planing taking into account the logistics of the people operating Apache attack helicopters.

Even with all of these measures, the Apache attack helicopter will break from time to time due to the wear and tear that involves simply using it. So you will need replacements for both the consumables and the pieces that receive most stress and are subject to be replaced. You will also need to pay up for all the tools and equipment to do these repairs and maintenance.

This implicitly involves a great dependency over industrial society, global capitalism, the constant extraction of nonrenewable earth resources and the fluctuations of world economy. You might find some ethical considerations about this or you might not care, but the dependency is still there. As a proud owner of an Apache attack helicopter you have become the endpoint and purpose of a large supply network involving billions of people and entire societies.

I do not know how you value your time and peace of mind, but now you will have to spend it into becoming an Apache attack helicopter mechanical expert in order to execute its maintenance tasks or you will need to hire a mechanic or team of mechanics to handle this.

Who will you hire? How will you hire him or her in order to incentivize a good service? Will they even be qualified? If the Apache attack helicopter never breaks then the mechanics do not make money, which shows there is a fundamental conflict of interest with the owner of the vehicle.

We have also assumed that you have the license from your government to drive this vehicle and that you are aware of all the idiosyncratic details of the aerospace regulation of your area. Failure to follow these norms mean that soon they will use their own Apache attack helicopters against you, which would be another different issue you will need to deal with.

Depending on the leverage this government has over its citizens, they might also ask you to pay additional taxes on either ownership or use of the vehicle through various forms. This is specially true if you are European. They might even force you to have a mandatory insurance in case you crash the Apache attack helicopter against another Apache attack helicopter or a school bus full of children.

Depending on your political lenses you might see this as a necessary security mechanism for the greater good of our society or a periodic ransom delivered to the government in order to use your own vehicle.

All these issues reveal that the actual costs of ownership of the vehicle are not just the costs of acquisition, but the somewhat hidden costs of its operation, maintenance and taxes not only over your wallet but also over your mental health due to the levels of bullshit you will need to deal with. As any romantic would say, not all is about money, but it probably is about a greater range of valuable and limited consumables such as time, energy and focus.

Probably ownership of this kind of asset is not for you, you might be as happy if not more by being a renter and delegating the bullshit to a specialized Apache attack helicopter renting company. This involves other issues depending on the arrangement, including remote deactivation upon breaking of an interpretation of the terms of service which involves giving away your power to some degree or simply increased costs that might actually reflect the real costs of owning this vehicle through the magic of a free market with a high level of competition.

Yes, you might need an Apache attack helicopter for some important things such as moving groceries to feed your family, commuting to work, or even running a business. What I propose is not to shy away from these issues but to be rightly aware of them in order to correctly assess them over your personal situation. Maybe you can use public transportation or a bike and organize your life around the available transport infrastructure provided by your society, this is only possible in some places of western Europe and some Asian countries.

Or maybe, your society is so weak and the existing infrastructure so fucked up, such as most of America and Africa, that it is actually required to own such a vehicle in order to survive. If this is a end of the world, Mad Max kind of scenario, will this vehicle be sustainable without the productive framework of an industrialized or global economy?