They can’t be serious about demanding a balanced takeoff, right? Are they saying that unless you have stop/start distance available you can’t take off in a jet, but it’s OK to take off in a single that will for sure result in crash if it fails? That just defies all logic.
I’m sure there are plenty of volunteers to even do it for free…
Sure, and trash it. If you want other pilots, you want them to have a stake 
They can’t be serious about demanding a balanced takeoff, right? Are they saying that unless you have stop/start distance available you can’t take off in a jet, but it’s OK to take off in a single that will for sure result in crash if it fails? That just defies all logic.
@bookworm is the man to ask
Adam that calculation is very interesting. Unfortunately it only works if you fly a lot (in this case until TBO or 5400 h). So you either have to buy very young for it to make sense or fly way over 100h/year for the calculation to make sense.
I’m 31. If I assume I will be able to fly until 76 that leaves 45 years of flying. Over this time span a flight time of 30 h/year seems realistic: less time now with young kids at home, more later when the kids have moved out and the financial constraints are less. So 45*30 = 1350 hrs of TT. Even if we assume 50 h/year, it’s just 2250 hrs. That makes the capital cost quite relevant.
Currently my salary is 60k€/year. If I become a consultant (possible within about 5 years), it will rise to approx 100k€/year. If I open my own surgery one day it might max. out at 200k€/year. After taxes and cost of living that leaves an average of say 10-20k€/year available income for flying over. If we optimistically assume I’ll work until 76 this will make calculations easier
Let’s say: 45y*10k€ = 450k€ of lifetime flying budget. As I don’t have all this money available now, there is no way to buy a turbine and then make use of its theoretically lower hourly cost: The capital cost is just too prohibitively expensive :(
Rwy20 wrote:
What other reason could there be for forming a syndicate than to save money by dividing up fixed costs among more owners?
Allocation of capital? If you get to the stage where you can seriously entertain the thought of buying a jet, then you most likely are also reasonably good managing your finances. Then, rather than letting an asset rot away in the hangar (and @Peter makes a very valid point about that), you minimize capital outlay and maximize utilization.
Well, and “minimizing capital outlay and maximizing utilization” wouldn’t be “to save money”?
@MedEwok – Even cheaper, then you don’t have to do the HSI inspection at all, as 853.3 hrs is plenty for you and will last a lifetime! You now have engine reserve costs of only $16.79/hr!
Of course capital cost is a big deal, but some old twin turbines are actually quite reasonably priced. You can get a lot of bang for the buck in this segment. As the economy has improved a little, the smoking hot deals are perhaps not there as much as they were 3 years ago, but you can still make very good buys. Many TP twins can be had for the same money as a higher end piston twin or a used Cirrus. That said, if you only fly 30 hrs a year, then a turbine is not something one should consider. Wouldn’t be safe nor economical. But at 80-100hrs/ year, they can start to make sense.
Adam, you seem to imply that nothing ever breaks on an old turbine. That is not correct. Instead of a cylinder, you need a new starter generator and that costs as much as changing a few cylinders on a Lycoming. You can easily fry the engines with seconds which means you need insurance against that which is expensive and adds to the cost. There are a lot of other expensive maintenance items on an old turboprop and I am sure that the total cost of ownership will be vastly higher than that of piston aircraft — for the private operator that does not try to earn money by operating it.
Your own turboprop doesn’t support your arguments, does it? Its hourly cost is still infinite. It’s OK to be bold and have fun but why do you keep talking about bargains and cheap while your history so far is about how to burn a lot of money in very little time, be it piston or turbine? I have a friend who keeps telling how cheap x, y and z are and how they pay for himself but all he has been doing for years is burn through millions of Euros and nothing has ever worked out the way he expected. He does it the same way — come up with some calculated and impressive base numbers but ignore all the other stuff in his overly optimistic view of things.
AdamFrisch wrote:
Even cheaper, then you don’t have to do the HSI inspection at all, as 853.3 hrs is plenty for you and will last a lifetime! You now have engine reserve costs of only $16.79/hr!
Two German expressions come to mind for this: A “Milchmädchenrechnung” (or in Swiss “Milchbüchleinrechnung”) translates to “naïve assessment of the situation”, but translated like that it sounds a bit harsh. And the second one is “sich in die Tasche lügen”, which literally means “to lie into your own pocket” but translates “to close your eyes to an obvious disadvantage to yourself”.
Because you cannot ignore depreciation, or to view it from another perspective, resale value. I know it’s an old debate, but with each hour that you put on your engine, you decrease its value, no matter what you plan to do with it at the end: Overhaul it yourself or sell it on. Only if you are sure that it will be scrapped at the end could you disregard the decrease in value. But in that case, you would have to divide the price of the turbine by the total number of hours that you intend to fly on it, not by the 2530 hours remaining that give you the 16.79 $/hr. Because if you fly exactly 853 hours to just before the HSI is due, any buyer will discount the price of the turbine by (at least) the 50,000 $ for the HSI (assuming an efficient market, i.e. you don’t find a stupid victim or are able to sell it to some failed state where HSI’s don’t matter). You will have paid the HSI one way or the other, either by the loss in value of your engine, or because you have to do it yourself. No way that you can get to 16.79 $/hr without one of the two fallacies described above.
Because you cannot ignore depreciation, or to view it from another perspective, resale value
You do have to ignore depreciation (at least to a degree) for “private fun stuff” otherwise you will die with a full bank account and having never done anything interesting.
The majority of what we buy is worth almost nothing the following day. Stuff like cameras can be sold on Ebay for some fraction of the purchase price, and “old” planes keep their value relatively well simply because of copious mandatory maintenance expenditure.
It gets a bit silly if you buy a new SR22 every year or two, but most serious plane owners (without massive money to burn) don’t do that. Almost everything about aircraft ownership is all about “long term”.
As the saying goes: buy your last plane first.
Adam is coming from the 200hr/year plus angle. In the TP/jet business there is zero 30hr/year operation. Also, these are high altitude machines, no good for photos (especially as pressurisation means the windows are no good for photos anyway) or for casual messing about at a few k feet. Most are used for serious travel, usually in connection with a business activity. It’s thus normal to see 300-500hrs/year on a bizjet. That is what the old piston twins were mostly used for, hence their owners upgraded when they could. I spoke to one owner who had a dual engine failure in a Baron over the N Sea, FL200, and while they restarted at 2000ft he sold it the next day and bought a King Air 90…
Peter wrote:
You do have to ignore depreciation (at least to a degree) for “private fun stuff” otherwise you will die with a full bank account and having never done anything interesting.
But then you can’t calculate a meaningful hourly price to compare two powerplant options like Adam tries to do here. As an extreme example, you could compare a Tesla Model S that came with free charging and warranty until 2022 with an old Ford Fiesta, and since you need to buy fuel and have more maintenance to do on the Fiesta, by yours and Adams’ reasoning would say “the Tesla is cheaper to drive”. OK, but that is what I call a “Milchmädchenrechnung” (“milk girls’ calculation”, literally translated).
If asset A has a high purchase price but low running costs, and asset B can be had for free but at a high running cost, how would you compare the two? You need to put in some denominator to get to an hourly price. Now, if you only plan to use asset A for half of its shelf-life and then sell it on, would you put (purchase price – sale price) in the numerator, or just (purchase price)? Adam put only the fraction of the purchase price that corresponds to the planned usage time in the numerator, and that is what I say is unrealistic. You can’t buy “33 % of a turbine”, except if you sell it later. But then you need to discount the sale price by the cost of the HSI, that is all I am saying.
The paragraph about “serious pilots” spending a lot of money on planes which you can’t even take photos from is very interesting, but I don’t see the relevance to this discussion. Except that in those cases, they need to adhere all the more to agreed accounting principles when they want to compare their operating costs between a Baron and a Kingair.
