"Crash Lander" wrote in message
...
If you are paying a day rate, does that cover you for unlimited wet use of
the aircraft during that period?Surely if you had to pay a day rate, you'd
use more time out of your 3 day vacation for sight seeing from the air?

No. It's not a "day rate", in which the pilot pays a flat per-day rate to
fly the plane for an unlimited number of hours during that day.

It's just what Andrew describes it as: a "daily minimum". That is, you are
still charged hourly, but if you take the airplane overnight, there is a
minimum number of hours that you will be charged per day for each day that
you have the airplane. The minimum is applied over the entire time you have
the airplane, so you don't actually have to fly the minimum each day to
avoid paying extra. You just have to average the minimum rate, otherwise
you wind up paying for time you didn't actually fly.

Typically, a "day" is a given 24 hour period. So if you take the airplane
overnight, that's only one "day". Different FBOs define it differently
though...there might be one out there that considers any overnight to be two
days.

So, for example, let's say you want to take the airplane out for a long
weekend, leaving Friday afternoon and coming back Monday afternoon. You'll
have the airplane out for three days, so with a two-hour daily minimum you
will pay a minimum of six hours of rental time. If your trip only involves
a two-hour flight out, and then a two-hour flight back, there's an extra two
hours of flight time you'll have to pay for even though you didn't actually
fly the plane more than four hours. Most pilots design their trips to make
sure they use the minimum time, either by flying far enough out, or by
including additional flying while around their destination.

I disagree that I was "missing" that factor per se...I already said that I
wasn't providing a complete enumeration, and IMHO the question of daily
minimums isn't usually a MAJOR part of the decision to own or not (but that
does vary individually, depending on what kind of flying one typically does
or wants to do). The exact analysis for ownership varies considerably from
person to person, and my goal was simply to state the most common, universal
factors. Yes, this is one of many things I didn't mention in my post, but
it doesn't mean I didn't intend for people to consider it. It was just
outside the scope of my post.

Pete