What do you charge yourself for flight hours?

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agmolnar
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Re: What do you charge yourself for flight hours?

Post by agmolnar »

Hi Bill,

I have had my plane in a club for the past 18 months or so. I have found the my variable operating cost per hour is about $60-65 per TACH hour (this assume ~350 tach hours per year). This includes all maintenance, but not fuel, which would add another ~$40 per hour (8gph x $5). This may be how the club gets to the $103, which is the marginal cost of flying one extra hour. This excludes purchase and other fixed costs (tiedown, insurance, etc) as mentioned above. I also concur that the costs of engine replacement is about $15/hr ($30k divided by 2000 hrs), which would be additive to the $60-65 for a "true" operating cost per hour.

Based on that, you could (or the club) charge whatever costs you want to recover, on a per operating hour basis.

I have a slightly different philosophy on costs, I think it's important to know exactly what you are spending so that you can verify that the plane is operating in the right ballpark, so to speak (also: occupational hazard of having an MBA). But the beauty of ownership is that it changes the bias from not flying (is this weekend trip really worth it?) to flying (I have the plane, therefore I should use it as every hour it flies lowers my per hour cost). The more the plane is flown, the more the fixed costs are offset -- which of course is the rationale for shared ownership and flying club participation...

Question for you: what is the commission or cost per hour that the club charges you / earns? If they are renting it wet and paying you a fixed monthly per hour, you would have to analyze if they are earning any $'s on the fuel itself.

Hope that it helpful -
Arpad
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rwtucker
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Re: What do you charge yourself for flight hours?

Post by rwtucker »

One small issue -- more human interest than financial -- while flight school use is generally regarded as hard on MLG, the opposite is true of engines. One of the flight schools that I am close to exceeds TBOs by a substantial margin on their aircraft. The Warrior I trained in was over TBO when I started my training and was still running with decent compressions when I finished.
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Re: What do you charge yourself for flight hours?

Post by Downeast25 »

Thank you all for the thoughtful responses. I have found the responses very helpful.
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Re: What do you charge yourself for flight hours?

Post by BkFlyer »

A little late on the response, but some more concrete information for others who read this–

I own my 40 with one other good friend. We charge ourselves $32/hr (dry), and personal fuel costs are usually $28-36/hr (@3.99/gal), bringing hourly costs to ~$65. We use Hobbs time for billing purposes to increase the fees a bit. A group of 3+ can probably use tach time because there are more hours to offset the fixed costs.

I think true cost per hour for us is around $185. Comparable rental rates around New York City are upwards of $175 (and not conveniently accessible).
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Thomas
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Re: What do you charge yourself for flight hours?

Post by Thomas »

You folks in the US are lucky ….. here in Europe we have to calculate the double …. 1 USG Avgas costs 8.5 USD - taxes / insurance / maintenance ….. all is much higher
Thomas Bienz DA40-180 40.337 D-ENMA (sold 08/2022)
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Re: What do you charge yourself for flight hours?

Post by BkFlyer »

Thomas wrote:You folks in the US are lucky ….. here in Europe we have to calculate the double …. 1 USG Avgas costs 8.5 USD - taxes / insurance / maintenance ….. all is much higher
I can't complain– prices are the lowest in the years I've been flying! My insurance cost is slightly less than what I pay for my Honda in NYC :roll:
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