@jvdo: Thank you very much for these figures! That is pure operational costs without invest. Not much cheaper than flying certified. Account for lower utility value, only 2 seats and limited cargo hauling, you are even closer. If bound to small airstrips closed for certified aircraft you have no choice, but less money seems not to be the real secret of microlight/UL.
If you throw in capital cost, you will spend your whole life lying in bed, and die worth millions, with everything invested in financial instruments, and never having done anything interesting 
Capital cost needs to be considered if running a plane as a business, of course.
And depreciation ought to be considered when buying because some things depreciate fast, but planes are for the long term, otherwise they make no sense – for various reasons, one of which is that you will usually buy a can of worms to some extent and that has to be sorted. Excluding upgrades, I have lost c. 50k since 2002, which is not bad.
Apart from big items like cars and planes, pactically everything we buy during our lives is worth almost nothing almost immediately. Depreciation is just the cost of having a life
I have to tell that after lurking EuroGA I’m not so sure about IFR.
IFR is wonderful. You have a choice of doing it in nice wx, bad wx, or everything in between. Most people think IFR is for flying in IMC but actually an IR enables you to fly mostly in VMC. I’ve done multiple trips to say Greece, 100% IFR, and never touch a cloud.
An acquaintance bought a Morane for 6000€ with good time left on the engine. It flies and flies…
I’ll open a new thread.
In business, yes
In private life as well, think about it .
Peter wrote:
Apart from big items like cars and planes, pactically everything we buy during our lives is worth almost nothing almost immediately. Depreciation is just the cost of having a life
True. Only thing I’ve not lost a ton of money in my life is real estate. Everything else – loss.
Year and a half ago family bought a brand new Volvo XC90. Lovely car and we love it, but best not to look to closely on the financial side. That sucker costs almost $900/month in leasing and when the 36 months are up, I have to pony up at least $36K to keep it. New cars are just the worst deals there are. If I had put the same amount of money into a mortgage for a little rental flat or something, I would probably have made tons of money by the end of the same 36 months.
I’ve considered cost of money and future value in everything substantial I’ve ever bought. As a direct result, having started with not a lot I now have some stuff I really appreciate including enough ‘mechanical pets’ (as my wife calls them!) to keep me having fun for the rest of my life, without being on somebody else’s treadmill.
jvdo wrote:
If you can buy a nice ultralight, a few years old around 80k-110k the price will remain stable for sure.
Of course, the same is true for a M20J or C182 or C172 in that region.
jvdo wrote:
But imagine you bought a new WT9 or VL3 in 2008 for 100k, now the price is 160k for the same plane.
jvdo wrote:
Total / hour = 44,9 Euro. Let’s say you would have 18k costs over the 2000h (overhaul engine 10k + overhaul prop 3k + some additional work on the airframe 5k), this is only 9 Euro / hour extra. 53,9 Euro without depreciation taken into account.
That is pretty much what a MS880 will cost, or a DR1050, given similar local hangar prices.
I think Snoopy’s pie chart is interesting. Is this what people here expected?
