Not forgetting the £1500 a year to Jeppesen
How would that figure be calculated?
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I honestly think that if it goes that far, that planes have to be thrown on the market like that, something has gone wrong taking care of them.
No, they have been very good taken care of by one dedicated mechanic when we have had them, Planes do not last forever, with some exceptions (Cub for instance). A 40-50 year old plane is NOT as good as a new one, unless it is restored to “new” condition (from a pure technical point of view), and this costs at least 40-50k. Still, it will not stay in “new” condition as long as a truly new one, before things starts to pile up again. Unless planes are really used a lot, like in a club, you do not have any data that shows what is going on because the likelihood something will break at any given moment throughout the year is very much reduced if you fly less than 50 h per year. We also have an old Saab Safir about the same age and hours as the Cub. Maintenance vise they are like night and day, the Safir can hardly fly a couple of hours without a snag of some kind (The Safir is not kept for its practicalities as an aircraft flying from A to B)
Also, what is the cost of maintenance? Cost being all hours and money used. What is the goal of the maintenance? What is good enough? For us, good enough is when a person wants to rent a plane, at least one plane shall be available and be able to fly whatever distance he wants. This is what keeps us (the club members) happy, it’s what make the planes fly as much as possible, and is what keeps the hourly rates down. Our rates are probably the lowest in Norway and Europe by the looks of it, and this is particularly true for the G1000 equipped C-172 SP. If we can sell the older C-172s and purchase one or two additional newer SP and/or an Aquila or something, that would make more people even more happy because unscheduled maintenance would be reduced (higher availability) and scheduled maintenance would be cheaper.
A get what you are saying. When flying 50 h per year, the total cost of maintenance will go down compared with flying 3-400, but the maintenance cost per hour will be higher. It will also be rather substantial compared with a microlight. You have to do yearly in an “organisation”. Lets take an example flying 50h per year.
EASA CofA, an old one: 50h per year and 3k scheduled maintenance + 2k unscheduled (a reasonable number)
Microlight/experimental: 50h per year and zero maintenance, but let’s say 250 € for new “tires and brakes”.
Each year the microlight/experimental cost you 4750 € less. This is 95 € per hour in maintenance alone. In comparison this is more than I pay to rent the Cub. This is for maintenance alone!!! Over 10 years this is more than 50k with interests. Why on earth would anyone pay 95€ per flight hour to maintain a 40-50 year old C-172? You also have to pay for fuel, hangar, insurance. All in all it will cost you substantially more than renting a G1000 equipped SP. What you have is an old, shabby C-172/Cherokee, and if you bring along someone, they will say “are we going to fly in that?” You could have had a new shiny glass equipped microlight and people look at it and say “wow”.
Peter wrote:
Not forgetting the £1500 a year to JeppesenHow would that figure be calculated
DESCRIPTION
Integrated Bundled Services.Garmin.G1000.PilotPak
Revision Service.Integrated Bundled Services.Standard with Jeppview. Annual:18-Nov-15 through 17-Nov-16
NavData.Coverage.Garmin.G1000.Central Europe
Airport Directory.Coverage.Garmin.G1000.AC-U-KWIK.International
Obstacles.Coverage.Garmin.G1000.United States & Europe
SafeTaxi.Coverage.Garmin.G1000.Europe
Terrain 4.9as.Coverage.Garmin.G1000.Worldwide
Integrated Bundled Services.Garmin.G1000.International.Data
Electronic Chart
Services.Garmin.G1000/G1000H/G900X/Perspective./Prodigy.Avionics
Electronic Chart Services.JV MFD.Software Assembly
Electronic Chart Services.Central Europe.JV MFD IFR.Coverage
IFR Paper Chart Services.ACEN07.Central Europe.Enroute Low.Supplement.Content
IFR Paper Chart Services.ACEN07.Central Europe.Enroute Low.Accessory Kit
Subtotal Freight @ Full Rate F 25.16
Subtotal Freight @ Reduced Rate R 47.79
AMOUNT DUE in EUR
2,178.57
If you’ve got a cheaper way of getting this on a G1000, I’m all ears. Asked the Q on PPL/IR and was told it was about right, although Garmin Pilotpak is cheaper, you can’t get the charts up on the MFD. Apparently you can now (so I’ve been told), but I haven’t validated that fact.
mh wrote:
Unless you aim at “like new” aircraft.
Exactly. To prevent maintenance cost soaring, the aim is indeed “like new”.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Again, wrecks are out there but they won’t pass a pre-buy normally.
Wreck is a strong word. You can keep a “wreck” flying, it just requires more looking after and more maintenance.
Anyway (I must stop getting wind up in “off the hip” examples 
) The fact is, there are lots of older and cheap aircraft out there that no one seems to urge for. There is a reason for this. The reason is that they are unattractive (visually) and uneconomical. They are simply old aircraft of the work horse kind that have done their job perfectly for the last 40-50 years, but are now reaching their final flying fields. The only way for them to keep on flying in competition from microlight and experimental, is to somehow shave off the maintenance cost. For a private person this means he have to be able to do the maintenance himself, that’s how I see it.
LeSving wrote:
that would make more people even more happy because unscheduled maintenance would be reduced (higher availability) and scheduled maintenance would be cheaper.
Please elaborate what items you think would be agebased unscheduled maintenance on an old C172, that would not need to be checked on newer C172? Please state, what agebased scheduled maintenance you think an old C172 has over a new C172. And while you’re at it, please give examples of items that are necessary in a C172 from 1960, that is not necessary in an RV-10A.
LeSving wrote:
Each year the microlight/experimental cost you 4750 € less.
By any chance: Do you have many owners in your aero club? Do you even encourage ownership and the access to real use of an aircraft?
EASA CofA, an old one: 50h per year and 3k scheduled maintenance + 2k unscheduled (a reasonable number)
Microlight/experimental: 50h per year and zero maintenance, but let’s say 250 € for new “tires and brakes”.
[my bold]
If I wrote that somebody was actually doing that, I would be thrown out of here 
The only way for them to keep on flying in competition from microlight and experimental, is to somehow shave off the maintenance cost. For a private person this means he have to be able to do the maintenance himself, that’s how I see it.
The way to reduce the hourly cost of flying is to fly more. So e.g. a school operating a plane will lose money at say 50hrs/year but will make lots of money at say the 700hrs/year which the 30 year old PA28-161 was doing in Arizona where I did my FAA IR.
The real challenge is not how to keep “wrecks” going on flying a few hours a year. That will always cost a lot of money. But every hangar queen will cost a lot of money – certified or uncertified. The real challenge is how to get more flying done.
People who think they can go uncertified and somehow get cheap flying with a hangar queen are deluding themselves. They will find loads of things wrong with it, all along. Hydraulic leaks, fuel leaks, avionics stop working, you name it.
@JWL – thank you; now I understand.
I posted this here but I don’t think it leads you anywhere particularly useful.
In short, you can reduce the cost of Jeppesen terminal charts if you are happy to fly with paper, PDFs, or even some other means (via sharing subscriptions e.g. the standard 4-device product can be shared 4 ways, and that is just talking of legal methods) but nobody I know of has ever found any way to reduce the cost of displaying the stuff on a panel mounted device. Well, apart from sharing the plane with other people
The only thing that’s happened recently on Jepp pricing has been the introduction of the one-device option, which is about 1/2 the cost of the long-standing four-device one (about €900 v. €2000, per year, for all of political Europe, VFR+IFR). Whether this is available for panel mounted products I don’t know, but most people flying with Jepp stuff in the panel also want a means of viewing the stuff back home, for flight planning etc. so a single-device price would not be useful.
mh wrote:
Please elaborate what items you think would be agebased unscheduled maintenance on an old C172, that would not need to be checked on newer C172? Please state, what agebased scheduled maintenance you think an old C172 has over a new C172. And while you’re at it, please give examples of items that are necessary in a C172 from 1960, that is not necessary in an RV-10A.
It’s all and everything. Instruments, nose wheel struts, trim, door, battery, windows, cables, fuel tank whatever. As I said, at some point it needs a more thorough refurbishment because all these things stars to pile up and it is impossible to maintain the availability needed to essentially keep people happy. This is what the numbers show. Both the C-172s we have for sale have been refurbished once some 7-8 years ago. They are still OK, so anyone purchasing them will indeed get an OK airplane. With the amount of flying we do, they will need to be refurbished again within 2-3 years. That could be a possibility, but that doesn’t make them new again. It still cost a lot of money to get them up to shape and that money is better spent on newer aircraft because that attracts more people.
With an RV-10, you can do everything yourself.
mh wrote:
By any chance: Do you have many owners in your aero club? Do you even encourage ownership and the access to real use of an aircraft?
There really is no need for this attitude mh, just because you for some reason just love to disagree with me. My club is a bunch of people flying for fun, as well as a flight school. It is the oldest existing club in Norway, started by a handful of Spitfire pilots right after the war. The members here are PPLs mostly, some are military pilots and some are airline pilots, and a growing number of microlight pilots (“our” EASA flight inspector is an Airline captain and a microlight pilot). I’m not sure how many members also have their own aircraft, 15-20? but our hangar is way too small for all of them. This spring we will build a new one, a T-hangar(ish) thing so that everybody who wish to have hangar space can simply extend it in one direction or the other.
What is “real use” of an aircraft? In our club no such thing exist. Everybody is welcome whether they fly B-737 “for real”, F-16s, the simplest microlight or a Cirrus. The only encouragement we have is for everybody to fly a bit more than looong landing curcuits. We have tail wheel, acro, NVFR, IFR, short field training in addition to ordinary PPL and microlight instructions.
Peter wrote:
If I wrote that somebody was actually doing that, I would be thrown out of here
Zero cost. Those microlights are much better maintained by their owners than the usual private spam can in any case.
@mh We routinely receive questions from people who have just bought an old plane (20-30k €) if the club wishes to “utilize” it for the club. We have done that in the past, but not anymore. Which is another reason why I think an old spam can is a bad idea. Cheap to purchase, but not cheap to use.
There is no doubt that newer aircraft attract more people (I have been saying that myself for all the time I have been flying) but to say
It’s all and everything. Instruments, nose wheel struts, trim, door, battery, windows, cables, fuel tank whatever. As I said, at some point it needs a more thorough refurbishment because all these things stars to pile up and it is impossible to maintain the availability needed to essentially keep people happy. This is what the numbers show. Both the C-172s we have for sale have been refurbished once some 7-8 years ago. They are still OK, so anyone purchasing them will indeed get an OK airplane. With the amount of flying we do, they will need to be refurbished again within 2-3 years.
and then say
With an RV-10, you can do everything yourself.
is a long way from the whole story, surely… An RV has a lot less cockpit trim than a C172 but it is otherwise mechanically very similar.
There is a lot of “apples and oranges” comparison being done here.
Le Sving, does your club have a website. Could you share it please. I am starting a new club in Central Scotland, and I like the sound of how you run yours. In a sense we share the same vision.
