Aero tow cost estimation

Hi Bill,

Took me a little while to get back to this, but I've got two spreadsheets to share with you.

One is a pretty generic airplane cost that you'll probably look at and feel familiar with. It's one I got from someone, cleaned up and added a few formulas in order to make changing variables cleaner and easier when trying to assess costs.

The second is pretty old. How old? Well, Avgas was $4.10gal last time I updated it. It was $5.85 here when I fueled on Sunday.

In any event, it's not terribly pretty, but allows you to assess the cost across the number of tows each year. That one is the GenericTowplaneCost.xls file.

Between the two you can probably work out a reasonable cost structure to anticipate for providing tows. Our towplane has been great for our club, despite an early rebuild and some unexpected damage pulling it from the hangar one day. I think we've been turning close to $20,000 in tow revenue annually as of late and that is at relatively low tow rates thanks to volunteer tow pilots.

Towplane Operational Costs:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...tEstimate.xlsx

Tow Costs vs Revenue
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...cTowCosts.xlsx

For what it is worth we are operating a Cessna 150/150 at an 800MSL private airport. 3000ft runway and 100+ temps in the summer time. We try not to take high tows in the heat of the day, but generally they aren't required and once you find a good thermal you can climb better off tow.

Hope this is helpful. You can look me up on the member locator if you want to hit me up directly about anything.

Morgan




On Monday, July 14, 2014 12:05:42 PM UTC-7, Bill D wrote:
Morgan, it's true - large, unexpected costs are a normal part of the airplane ownership experience. Having owned all or part of several airplanes, I managed to get buy by adding 35% to the expected costs to cover unbudgeted liabilities. Sometimes there was an annual surplus, sometimes a deficit but it seemed to average out. But then, maybe I was lucky.



Could you upload your spreadsheet to a public DropBox folder and let us have the link. I kinda hate to put an e-mail address on RAS.





On Monday, July 14, 2014 11:13:00 AM UTC-6, Morgan wrote:

Bill,







I think I have what you are basically looking for. You'll have to adjust the variables for your scenario, but I did this breakdown years ago.







What has continually been a factor outside the ability to capture in a spreadsheet are the unexpected costs. The engine that hadn't been run routinely for the last 10 years or whatever prior to our acquisition and subsequent internal corrosion that resulted in a rebuild at 1200hrs instead of 2000.