Many people look for ways to motivate themselves to put in the required hours of flight instruction to get their pilot’s license. In January 2007, though, David Jaynes, who had wanted to learn to fly ever since he was a kid, was no longer messing around. So he came up with a brilliant psychological ploy: He bought a $500,000 Cirrus SR22.

“It certainly changes your commitment to the training,” explains the 55-year-old real-estate developer and former star college quarterback. “You can’t just walk away from it.”

Jaynes’s decision to pull out the big guns was the direct result of another, even larger purchase, or purchases: three home sites at Cornerstone, a luxury residence resort outside Montrose, Colorado, where he planned to erect three $4 million spec houses. From his home in Los Angeles, the twice-weekly trip he anticipated making to Montrose Airport was either a quick 60-minute hop in that SR22 he didn’t know how to fly or a tedious two-hour slog through LAX and Denver.

“I didn’t want to be in either place for extended periods,” Jaynes says. “I wouldn’t have even considered building there if I didn’t intend to have my license very quickly.”

The plan, of course, worked just as Freud (and Milton Friedman) would have predicted. Eight months later, Jaynes not only had his pilot’s license, but he had already accumulated more than 125 flight hours. Today, that number is up to 225, and Jaynes is a hard guy to pin down, flying the family dog up to the veterinary center at UC Davis and zipping up to Idaho to check on recycled barn timbers for some trusses.

“Living in the West is great, given all the places you can fly,” he says.

Serious college-football fans might remember Jaynes as one of the most prolific passers in University of Kansas history. A first-team All-American, he was drafted by his hometown Kansas City Chiefs in 1974 before a shoulder injury his rookie season forced him to start looking for what he laughingly calls a “real career.” At least now he has a real hobby to go with it. 

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