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When the Roads Are Dangerous, Fly Instead

Imagine you’re all set up in a compound you bought specifically for the purpose of riding out a disaster. Your walls are high and well-defended by your personal generators powering electric battlements. You have enough food and water for plenty long. What you can’t do, however, is use the roads for anything. They may be broken or unserviceable or just overrun with looters and marauders, but whatever the reason, your travel by land is blocked. In that kind of circumstance, the best way to travel is in the air! This time on Rob Raskins’ Millionaire Survivalist, we’re talking personal luxury flight apparatuses!

Personal Jets Aren’t the Only Way

It’s possibly you already have access to a private jet, or may own one yourself. However, you’re definitely aware of the amount of work and coordination and extra people it takes to operate one. Surely unless you’ve been qualified as a jet pilot yourself, there’s not a great likelihood that you’d be just hopping into your private jet and flying over to your friend’s place. No, while this is a great way to have privatized travel that allows for convenience and safety during a non-apocalypse time, once SHTF time comes around, you will very likely not have access to your team of aviators and private airport staff.

This is why it is important to invest in something that’s a little more personal. A craft that you can operate by yourself or with minimal assistance is the ultimate goal of flight-based disaster preparation. While a personal jetpack might still be a little far off the horizon (though, as it turns out, not that far!), here are some other already-extant options.

Helicopters for Mobility and Status

Chances are that the first thing you thought when you saw the title of this article was a helicopter. That’s a great idea for many reasons! They are versatile, more affordable than a full-on jet, and environmentally-friendly to boot. Not to mention, owning a helicopter grants an instant status symbol to the owner!

Take the Eurocopter EC145, for instance. Coming in just short of a $9M price tag, this helicopter has a ton of great amenities. The spacious cabin can be configured to seat up to nine people comfortably, with air conditioning, XM Satellite radio and a Blu-Ray player included standard. Many helicopters can, over long periods of use, cause vibration-based injuries in their occupants, but the EC145 has a specially-designed vibration-dampening cabin insulation that helps to prevent the nerve-numbing and also muffle the sound of the rotors.

The landing gear on this hefty beast will allow for a landing or takeoff on virtually any surface. Access to the cabin is through a double-clamshell design for passengers and a familiar car-door style for the pilots, so you can have easy in-and-out when you’re on the ground. Especially useful is the short time it takes between standing still and takeoff, so if you need to go somewhere in a hurry, you’ll be out of there in no time.

This model is popular both in the civilian as well as the military markets, and the model has seen use in more than 20 countries because of its ease of use and flexibility in function. Whether you want it as an emergency medical escape vehicle set up to carry injured and sick, or a transport to ferry you and your family in relative luxury, this craft will serve you well.

Ultralights for Distance and Endurance

If you want to go far fast, a helicopter won’t exactly do it for you the way that an ultralight will. Now a far cry from the old crop dusters of the past, the newest in ultralight plane technology will have you making trips in the clouds with no problems. They lack the vertical takeoff of a helicopter, but make up for it well with their ability to travel quietly and for long distances. If you’ve got the space for a landing strip on your property, you could do much worse than picking up an ultralight.

A highly recommended luxury plane comes in the form of the TL-3000 Sirius from TL Ultralight, coming in at an easy $175,000. Their design philosophy centers around comfort and form in tandem with function, so when they say the cockpit is a spacious and comfortable one, they mean it. A surprisingly-large cargo storage area is paired with a pilot seating that accommodates even those who are more well-built than average. Add this to the ergonomic design of the piloting controls, and you will have nothing but easy, comfortable trips in this plane.

An easy 2000 kilometers of flight distance with a full tank of fuel makes this the choice for those who need to be in several places but still remain safe. You can fly at a cool 220 kilometers per hour, high enough that most conventional firearms wouldn’t reach you from the ground. Plus, it’s way quieter than a loud helicopter, so you can get where you’re going while attracting less attention.

With the lowest-end engine clocking 80 horsepower and optimization options going up from there, this is a powerhouse of flight that can guarantee your safe passage from one landing strip to another. Use this vessel for long supply runs, or to travel to places where your friends and family are and bring them back to your safe compound. The freedom and security are yours when you pilot this craft.

Cruise the Skies in Safety and Comfort

It’s pretty plain to see: if your TEOTWAWKI retreat is inland, you’ll want access to the sky. Training for skycraft is readily available, and in as little as four weeks you can be ready to pilot yourself into the clouds and away from the dangers of overland travel. You’ll thank yourself later, when you’re soaring above the unusable roads on the way to your destination.

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Get Rid of Your Medical Problems Before SHTF

 

Let’s be real: there’s a significant chance that you, reading this article, have some kind of minor physical or medical ailment that you have mitigated through the use of some kind of treatment or tool. Many people wear contact lenses to correct their vision, many use electronic hearing aids to assist with hearing loss or deterioration, and a vast number of people suffer from allergies that make certain seasons or exposure to specific items unbearably uncomfortable.

But, can you reliably get contact lenses or hearing aid batteries or antihistamine tablets once things go south? Today on Rob Raskins’ Millionaire Survivalist, we’re going to address how to get rid of your reliance on disposable remedies.

Medical and Cybernetic Enhancements for the Future

Modern medicine and technology have made things like chronic hearing loss something of the past. Every day, doctors and scientists funded by donations from millionaires like us make ailments less and less likely to affect your everyday life. If you’re not taking advantage of the phenomenal permanent fixes that are now available to you, then you are missing out on your own personal protection.

Fix Your Eyes

Everyone these days has heard of Lasik surgery. Essentially, a surgeon makes a tiny and precise cut on your cornea, opening up a passage into the working parts of the eye itself. Then, using a high-powered but very small laser, they will reshape the cornea itself to alleviate imperfections in your eye’s lens. The result is an almost-always permanent improvement to your eyesight, which removes the necessity for external enhancements like contacts or glasses.

Listen, if you have bad eyesight and haven’t been treated with Lasik yet, you are behind the times. You won’t be able to reliably acquire contact lenses or glasses replacements once the SHTF, so if you go into an apocalypse scenario with bad eyes you are at a distinct disadvantage. Go right now and get your eyes fixed immediately. Treatment for each eye averages at a measly $3,000 or so, so for it being as affordable as it is, you should just go and have it done first thing.

There’s a small possibility that the eye will, over a period of several years, continue to readjust itself in the same manner that it originally did to make your original impairment. However, this is not only very rare, but if it DOES happen it takes several years to do so. By the time you need vision correction again, the chances are that society will have returned back to normal and you’ll have your availability back. The bottom line is, you’re wasting your time if your eyes aren’t perfect.

Fix Your Ears

A significant portion of Americans experience some level of hearing loss, and of that portion, many make use of a mechanical hearing aid. These small devices are often inserted into the ear canal externally, and are powered by small button cell batteries. While they tend to work well initially, there are several dangers that they pose. Impingement of the ear canal due to pushing earwax back into it constantly with the insertion of the hearing aid is very common, as is improper calibration of the amplifier damaging the eardrum even more.

We don’t need any of that. That’s something to leave in the past, because dealing with that on top of an EOTWAWKI scenario is unnecessary. No, you can forget the faulty devices because science has the option of cochlear implants and middle-ear implants. The middle-ear implant works well with partial hearing loss, and is a permanent solution to it.

A surgeon will implant a receiver and a working end into your ear, attaching it to either one of the cochlear bones or near the eardrum itself. Then, an external processor attaches to the receiver and processes sound in your environment. Unlike a normal hearing aid, this does not amplify sound at all. Instead, it transmits it to the inner ear and physically moves the ear’s working parts. This produces actually natural-sounding sound, a far better result than standard hearing aids.

These implants cost around $15,000 per ear, and take about 8 weeks to fully implant and activate. Both affordable and safe, this option doesn’t exactly restore your hearing to perfect, but it does improve it without the use of a stick-in hearing aid. If you need it, you can get it done.

Fix Your Sinuses

Allergies are pervasive and difficult to control on the best of days, and this possible solution is the most experimental and expensive of the ones listed here. We’re getting into the real heavy science now. Let’s talk about the possibilities of gene therapy.

In 2017, a study at University of Queensland found that there is a possibility of a single dose of gene therapy could produce a lifetime immunity to allergens. Allergies are basically your body’s immune system reacting to a false positive and trying to expel the offending otherwise-benign substance from the body. When the body reacts to an allergen, histamine responses cause white blood cells to go into full defense mode.

The reason that these responses happen is because immune cells called T-cells recognize the proteins in an allergen and compare them to the “memory” of previous exposures. Here’s where gene therapy comes in. Thanks to the study’s findings, it’s possible to functionally erase the T-cells’ memory of the allergen protein, and therefore make them uninterested in attacking the allergen. The pricetag on this one is a respectable $650,000, but if you can get it, it’s worth never having to deal with potentially lethal allergies again.

The Bottom Line

You can’t assume that you will have access to disposable, single-use supplies in the future. Why not simply fix the problems that you have before they become real trouble? Science exists for the purpose of making your life easier, and in an EOTW scenario, you’ll thank yourself for having the foresight to permanently fix anything that you had going before.