Why is chartering (renting) in the UK so expensive?

It also depends on what part of the country you live in.

South=expensive. North=Not so expensive

I pay 100 quid an hour to rent a C150 and 130 pounds for a C172.

Peter wrote:

Also a hefty annual fee encourages utilisation. If there is no commitment then some people will cancel a trip if the cloudbase is below 3000ft It’s the same with fly-ins; if you block-book a hotel, organise a bus, and charge everyone €250, you get a high turnout.

Something strikes me as wrong to offer people financial incentives (in this case, “utilization” of the fixed fee) to go fly if they feel uncomfortable with the WX…

I agree, but there is a big grey area in between.

Based on what I see, many times, people frequently cancel due to “social” reasons e.g. daughter getting invited to a party and needs to be collected at 2am… so why not cancel the fly-in, which tends to have no “family support” anyway… This will be equally true in the rental business, when the slightest “incentive change” will cancel the burger-run flight (and few renters do more than burger runs, due to the high marginal cost).

On a typical fly-in, half of the cancels are due to broken aircraft (some of those might actually be due to other factors of course) and half are due to wx or (if wx is clearly not a factor) because the person got a better offer elsewhere The same will happen in the rental scene and will bring down the utilisation, especially in UK wx.

There used to be schemes here (EGKA, EGKB, etc) around SR22s and they had a massive annual fee of a few k. For that you purchased an entitlement to an hour block of X hours a year. It worked out at c. £300/hr, so again these were used mostly for stuff like taking a girl out to Le Touquet

I used to rent out my TB20 2002-2006, and very cheaply too (£80/hr DRY + VAT) so had first hand experience of the stuff that goes on. I have written about it already here somewhere. I got a number of “interesting” characters… some quite nasty cases of the fuel totaliser being tampered with.

The bottom line is that rental is not an easy business.

mrfacts wrote:

When you compare the EUR142/h wet with other providers you’ll find that this is extremely cheap and has no commercial viability. I assume that your club has the aircraft written off, do their own annuals and you are charged for the membership at something like EUR500 a year on top translating to anything from EUR10 to EUR50 on top per hour? Is your German Archer hangared? Hangarage alone costs like EUR4.000/year in the EDL area and needs to be offset.

EUR 142/h wet seems quite possible. My club has an Archer which we could rent for that amount without making a loss. The aircraft is under CAMO and we buy all maintenance. It has a GNS430, ADF, DME, mode S and a working A/P so it’s not a piece of junk either. The membership fee is about EUR 400/year all of which goes to operating the club and the airfield. (We have our own airfield.)

I say we “could” charge EUR 142/h wet, but in practice we charge a bit more to even out depreciation costs between aircraft the club has owned for a long time and more recently bought aircraft. (Otherwise newly bought aircraft would be unreasonably expensive compared to the ones that were bought a long time ago.)