Future Club Training Gliders

In article Darryl Ramm writes:

Why would you cap a DG-1000 at a 3,000 hour life? There are already
published 3000, 6000, 9000 (and every 1000 hours) inspections for the
DG-1000. There are many high time ASK-21 around well beyond 3,000
hours. Many well used and patched up but still bright and shiny and
modern looking.

My bad. I was way too asleep when I wrote that.

I found later that the service life of the ask-21 is 18,000 hours,
apparently with similar inspections, where the DG claims 12,000 per
another poster. In either case, the cost for that does go way down.


OTOH the price quoted did was too low. No trailer, instruments, other
options, etc. and I'm not sure a linear depreciation is the right
model.


Indeed, all true. I had forgotten about trailer/instruments/etc.,
stupidly assuming they were included. Linear depreciation is most
likely wrong, too, though lots of cost/hour operation calculations
seem to use i.

I should have included insurance costs and other costs that are
calculated into operating cost. For aircraft used for clubs and
training, I would expect this to be a big item, and the order of
magnitude higher price of the glider would have a large effect on
the price of the annual insurance bill.


But, I blew it big on the 3000 hours.

Alan

On Nov 11, 7:59*pm, (Alan) wrote:
In article Bruce Hoult
And the DG is also expensive. *I am not certain about the service
life of any of these, but if they are 3000 hours to scrap, then the
current $102,500 price (74300 Euro posted by unclhank on 10/21/10)
$34.17 per hour just for the capital of the glider, not counting
maintenance, insurance, taxes, storage.

That's about 10k EUR more than when we were looking, but that was
2006. If the relativity has remained the same then I'd guess the
DG1000s Club would be about $80k EUR now.


* If you can run them longer, the cost goes down, but the hourly cost
of operation is still high.

We put about 250 hours on each of our DG1000's in a year. At that rate
3000 hours would be 12 years.

As it happens, before the DG1000's we had two 1978ish Grob Twin Astirs
for about 12 years, buying them in 1995 and selling in 2007-2008. We
paid around 30k EUR for them (17 years old), put about the same number
of hours per year on them, and then sold them for around 25k EUR.

The clubs we sold them to apparently don't think they are ready to
throw away.

Our DG rep told us 12,000 hours expected service life for the DG1000s.
That doesn't seem unreasonable.

That brings the per hour cost down to about $9 per hour.


* Show the potential student the ask-12 or the dg-1000, and show him
the cost of operation, along with an old glider that doesn't have the
high hourly operating costs, and a lot will figure that saving a bunch
of money is good - it can mean more flying time in the less impresive
glider.

Older gliders cost less per hour for capital, but tend to cost more
per hour fomr maintenance.

I'll also note that when I was flying Blaniks I thought 30 minutes was
a pretty good flight unless it was really booming, which it seldom is
here. In the DG1000 I can stay up as long as I want on a lot more days
throughout the year. That saves a huge amount on tows.