On 8-Aug-2005, xyzzy wrote:

In the club I pay dues of $45/mo, and $80/hr wet to fly 160 hp Piper
Warrior II's with Apollo GPS and coupled autopilot. The club has a
fleet of four of them. That is the sum total of my airplane expenses and
includes a very good insurance policy (all club members are named
insureds), access to a hangar with offices that the club owns, and
social events. Since joining the club I've been flying on average 6
hours a month, which is 72 hours a year. I know exactly how much it has
cost me and I also know exactly how much it will cost me in the future
to fly.


So that works out to $87.50 per hour total cost ($80 + $45/6). Not bad,
but...

I co-own (with 2 others) an Arrow IV. We each fly roughly 70 hours/year,
for a total of (typically) a bit over 200 hours. We almost never have
scheduling conflicts. A couple of years ago we calculated what our hourly
costs were running, including all direct and indirect operating costs --
essentially everything we spent to fly, maintain, store, insure, and upgrade
the plane. Since the value of the plane is probably increasing at about the
same rate as most low-risk investments, we did not factor in the cost of
missed investment opportunity associated with our equity. The number came
out to about $90/hr, quite a bit below what rental rates would be for a
comparable plane. With today's higher fuel costs, the number is now
probably running closer to $100/hr.

We keep the plane meticulously maintained, stored in an enclosed hangar, and
we have a $1 million "smooth" liability policy as well as low deductible
hull coverage. The only maintenance we do ourselves is oil changes.

What this shows is that once annual utilization gets to about 200 hrs/year,
the per hour costs tend to flatten out. That's why I prefer my co-ownership
arrangement. Diff'rent strokes, as they say.

-Elliott Drucker