MedEwok wrote:
At our club we are trained on an Aquila A211, built in 2016.
I know the training scene in Germany quite well (at least I think) as far as PPL and upwards is concerned. There are three main kinds of providers:
1. Flying clubs. They are non-profit organisations, managed mainly by volunteers and in many cases not even the instructors get paid. Their main source of income are the annual fees of their members of which only 20 percent or so really fly, the remaining 80 percent just keep their license current. This leaves these clubs with plenty of funding to buy modern trainers like Aquilae or Katanas. As a club with 100 members only trains 3 to 5 new pilots each year, these aircraft don’t get beaten as much as those of a commercial outfit. For such a club it makes perfect sense to buy modern aircraft.
2. Commercial training centres who have contracts with airlines. They exclusively do ATPL integrated courses, often with similarly equipped aircraft from day one (glass cockpit/sidestick) to prepare their students for the Airbus they are going to fly 200 hours later. They know more or less exactly how many students they get to train every year and can set up a large Excel sheet to optimise their cost/benefit ratio. In the end, they charge the students the exact amount it costs to train them (+ profit margin…), knowing that the almost guaranteed employment they advertise with will get them always enough business. Accountants don’t like surprises, so they buy new aircraft with leasing contracts, manufacturer warranty and maintenance contracts. This results in predictable hourly rates.
3. The majority however are private flying schools which come in all sizes and training levels. From pure PPL outfits with a C152 and a C172 to big ones which offer anything up to ATPL from 5 different bases with a fleet of 30 aircraft. One year, when Ryanair and Easyjet are hiring, they must send away applicants because they can’t fit more than 20 students in the classroom, and the next year when no one is hiring they get only 3 students on the course. No way can such school afford to buy modern training aircraft for 300.000 Euros upward which one year will sell 1000 hours and the next year maybe less than 100. One bad year requires three good years in a row to recover the loss. There are never three good years in a row, so the whole enterprise must to fail. A 30 year old Pa28 which was purchased for 30.000 Euros ten years ago can be pushed into the corner of the hangar and will cost nothing while it sits there waiting for better times. And if need be, it can always be sold again for those 30.000 Euros. Your 300.000 Euro Aquila will lose 1/2 of it’s value over 5 years without having flown for a single hour just because it is five years old.
I was trained and have always instructed in this kind of school. My current one (for more than 10 years now) is a family business in the third generation. It is certainly not a money making machine, but doing well enough and has fed it’s owners and employees in a decent manner for over half a century. I can not remember ever having flown on an training aeroplane which was younger than 20 years. Some of our trainers have been rebuilt from insurance write-offs purchased cheaply, one was even recovered from the bottom of Lake Constance after ditching there. The school has it’s own licensed maintenance, mainly for servicing the training fleet, but in quiet times instead of paying the mechanics for doing nothing they rebuild these wrecks. Put a new engine in, a G500 glass panel and fresh leather on the seats and for 100.000 Euros you get a perfect Piper Arrow trainer which factory new will cost 300.000 or more. Very simple first-grade mathematics!
That’s a great summary W_N.
The only problem in your category 1 is that if they get a decent plane, and one of the “5hrs a year” members actually turns up, he is a lot more likely to break it. And, if the plane is nice ansd shiny, then god forbid, he might fly more often which is exactly what the flying members don’t want 
Peter wrote:
The only problem in your category 1 is that if they get a decent plane, and one of the “5hrs a year” members actually turns up, he is a lot more likely to break it
Not at all. From my memory, aircraft (at our club) have been broken by storms and stupid taxing accidents where instructors are involved. The “5 hours a year” member tries do to everything right, are very careful, and at least a couple of those hours are with an instructor anyway. Lots of people end up in an “instructor trap”. That is, they use the time to “improve” their ratings rather than fly. Night rating, tail wheel, short field, more advanced VFR navigation using GPS and instruments (correctly), G1000 “familiarization”, how to use the autopilot and so on. With enough of these things, they will keep busy just to “refresh” their skills every other year with an instructor. Maybe EIR will also become such a “trap”, but so far it seems to be uninteresting for everyone. Most of them will never use their skills to anything particular, but learning this stuff is more fun and interesting than flying from A to B, for the only purpose of flying from B to A again. It’s only understandable when thinking about it, flying straight and level is the least exciting flying you can do, and with little time at hand in the first place, well.
The 20% that use their time flying (alone), fly relatively frequently. They are satisfied with knowing just the basics, or at least enough to fly the way they want to. They aren’t either likely to break something, most of them eventually ends up with their own plane or as instructors or something (towing gliders for instance 
)
I think WN is pretty much spot on regarding clubs, but it’s not that a club has enough money to simply purchase a brand new trainer all by itself. It’s more about a modern trainer (glass, nice looking interiors, some instruments) is the only thing that will keep the “5 hours a year” member flying those 5-10 hours instead of just 1 or 2. The trainer could be a Cessna, or any other stuff really, but durability is a key point, and Cessnas have proven themselves to be durable.
what_next wrote:
I know the training scene in Germany quite well (at least I think) as far as PPL and upwards is concerned. There are three main kinds of providers:1. Flying clubs.
Flying clubs in Germany seem to work differently compared to Scandinavia. I’ve understood from other postings that membership fees are quite high. Our club membership fees are about €400/year, which is on the high side for Sweden. (The main reason for that is that we run our own airfield.)
Their main source of income are the annual fees of their members of which only 20 percent or so really fly, the remaining 80 percent just keep their license current
You mean income above what is needed for the operating costs of the aircraft, I assume?
LeSving wrote:
I think WN is pretty much spot on regarding clubs, but it’s not that a club has enough money to simply purchase a brand new trainer all by itself. It’s more about a modern trainer (glass, nice looking interiors, some instruments) is the only thing that will keep the “5 hours a year” member flying those 5-10 hours instead of just 1 or 2. The trainer could be a Cessna, or any other stuff really, but durability is a key point, and Cessnas have proven themselves to be durable.Odd… My club only has “spamcans” of various ages from 11 to 38 years and we still have a substantial number of “5 hours a year” members.
And our flight training is booming even though our primary training aircraft is a 1997 Cessna 172R.
Airborne_Again wrote:
You mean income above what is needed for the operating costs of the aircraft, I assume?
Yes, of course! Typical figures around here would be: Hiring a C172 commercially will cost around 200 Euros for a not-very-new aircraft. A flying club membership will cost 1000 Euros per year, but members can fly a newer C172 for 100 Euros an hour. Therefore it can make sense to join a club if you actually fly more than 10 hours per year. All those 5 hr/year members (the vast majority) actually subsidise the club.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Odd… My club only has “spamcans” of various ages from 11 to 38 years and we still have a substantial number of “5 hours a year” members.
And our flight training is booming even though our primary training aircraft is a 1997 Cessna 172R.
And don’t see how that is different or opposite of what I said.
AdamFrisch wrote:
Good old G-BIJV
Still flying at EGLK Blackbushe with AirFirst.
LeSving wrote:
And don’t see how that is different or opposite of what I said.
You said
It’s more about a modern trainer (glass, nice looking interiors, some instruments) is the only thing that will keep the “5 hours a year” member flying those 5-10 hours instead of just 1 or 2.
Which in my experience is not true.
what_next wrote:
Typical figures around here would be: Hiring a C172 commercially will cost around 200 Euros for a not-very-new aircraft. A flying club membership will cost 1000 Euros per year, but members can fly a newer C172 for 100 Euros an hour. Therefore it can make sense to join a club if you actually fly more than 10 hours per year. All those 5 hr/year members (the vast majority) actually subsidise the club.
So the aircraft rental fee only covers marginal cost while you take all the fixed costs over the membership fee?
That’s certainly something which would encourage people to fly more. I would personally love such a setup, but the risk is that the 80% who only keep the licenses current would simply drop out.
