PPL + small plane + real costs ?

[J B L]

Hello all,

I am seriously thinking of taking that flying malarkey a bit further. I only have 5 hours on Piper Warrior and I absolutely love it.

I know the cost of my PPL (roughly £10k incl. all tests, books, charts, memberships...), I know how much it'll cost to carry on flying/navigating with the club's members but what I really want to know and have your experiences and advice is: What would it take to take it one step further.

I know some nice little planes could cost as much as a brand new 911, possibly less. Say I had this sort of money, spend it, get my plane what would I be looking at in terms of annual running costs?

Let's imagine this scenario:
- 1 x Piper warrior or similar to fit the small family in
- insurance
- annual
- Avgas for 2 trips to Bordeaux and/or Marseille region per year. But also for 50 to 100 h per year of flying.
- hangar fees
- general maintenance

Can you recoup some of your costs by chartering your plane to the club and/or the school?

You get my drift . This is a completely hypothetical scenario and may never come to fruition. But, from experience, what sort of £££ are we talking about here once the licence has been obtained and the aircraft acquired?

Cheers

[Dr Jekyll]

At 100 hrs a year you are probably much better off in a group. To get a rough idea of costs look at adverts for group ownership and multiply the monthly charge by the number in the group.

I think about £400/500 a month plus £100 a flying hour might be realistic.

[pteron]

A lot depends on where you keep it.

We have 8 in our group, flying a Robin DR250 from a lovely grass strip in Wiltshire.

Monthly cost is £75 (hangarage is expensive, insurance is expensive etc), we charge £25 an hour dry, she burns 25 to 30 litres an hour depending on how fast you want to go.

Group flying is definitely the way to do it.

[JW911]

As above. Buy into a group initially. There is a rule of thumb based upon annual hours which says (roughly):

0-20 hours per year, rent.
20-200 hours per year, share.
200+ hours per year, own.

I do 20-30 hours a year in a Yak52 and own 1/10th. I could possibly justify up to a 1/5th share but owning one outright would be thoroughly pointless as it would spend most of it's life sitting on the ground. This way, it flies more often (better for it) and nine other (mad!) blokes help pay the bills (better for me!). Otherwise, it would cost approximately £45k to buy, £650 per month fixed costs and £170 per flying hour plus the odd couple of thousand quid a year for extras.

If you want to get into a share, ask yourself a) how much flying you want to do, b) what sort of flying you want to do (aerobatics, continental touring, farmstrip flying, etc) and c) when you want to do it.

The answer to a) is at the top.

b) No point picking a Yak52 if you want to fly down to the south of France every weekend. Equally, no point picking a Piper Warrior if you want to do aerobatics.

c) If you want to fly at weekends, pick a group where weekend availability is good. Self explanatory really but not necessarily easy to find.

Hope that helps.

Edited by JW911 on Thursday 26th August 12:04