Did you fly or go by car to Abu Simbel?

We originally plan to fly even though Egypt Air truly puts this route in super gouging mode.  But the only available departure schedule is the 7:55am flight.  ASN is almost an hour drive from Aswan city.  You also need to arrive min 30 min early.  The flight itself is 45 min.  All add up to flying still uses 2+ hours one way versus 3 hrs by car.  you also need to leave hotel by 6am or no later than 6:15am for the 7:55am flight.   That has no difference than the pick up time of going by  tour bus.
 

We would bite the bullet if the 10:25am flight to and 2:15pm flight from, are available.  Unfortunately the 2:15pm return flight only has 1 seat remains in "coach" price, the remaining seats are labeled as "business" and cost 2.5 times more.  There is no difference whatsoever among the seats, all are the crappy Airbus A200 for cheap, short flights.  At the end we decided to use Private Car which is 30% more than the tour bus but still is 1/3 of the cost of flying.  We request the Private Car leaves at 7 or 7:30am.  I think they can accommodate.

I just read on TripAdvisor, a couple face the same dilemma as we.  They also opted for Private Car at the end.

The issue of going by car is,  the road conditions have deteriorated a lot in the past 2.5 years due to lack of maintenance caused by much less tourists hence much less revenues.   There were 2 fatal accidents involved tour buses since April.  One happened in April was head on strike by a big truck.  One happened in June was a collision of two tour buses.  Together there were Almost 20 fatalities, 2/3 of them were tourists from Europe.