It’d be interesting to list what percentage of the annual operating costs the annual inspection represents. Mine’s around 15% (for 130 hours this year, light twin, no surprises except for a blown up alternator but that was covered by Hartzell’s warranty and 2 dead cylinders but all the ECis are dead to me anyways).
I have a lot of sweat equity in the plane too, I suspect that it makes a huge difference.
Good Q. I reckon my scheduled maintenance spend is around 10-20% of my annual flying costs, which are dominated by avgas.
2019 has been a bit more because I did a precautionary swap of various accessories, and just spent ~1k on doing a cylinder.
IMHO if someone is spending say 50%+ on maintenance, they will soon lose the will to keep flying.
Owner assisted annuals always help cut the costs as:-
(a) the owner can remove all of the inspection panels/ cowlings/ wheel pants/ change the oil/ clean, test and gap the plugs. Do the brakes, wheel bearings and much more. Then put everything back again after the inspection
(b) means you know exactly was was inspected and can only be billed for time spent – although when you have found a good engineer this isn’t an issue in any case.
So for a PA28 181. 100- 150 hours per annum. My cheapest Annual was £ 1,200. A normal Annual is circa £ 2,500. The most expensive Annual I ever had was £ 3,700 and that was the one I did not help with and I was least happy with.
I don’t consider a recent re-spray and 2 years ago re-skinning one panel as “Annual” work. This has substantially improved the Aircraft – ie when I bought it I had 7/10 paint. Now I have 10/10 paint and virtually zero corrosion. I can’t decide if replacing my Mags for new ones well before IRAN time is Annual work or improvement.
My Aircraft is maintained well above the standard of most I see.
A standard annual for my Arrow 200 including standard consumables like filter etc + required documentation is 2300 euros. It is done at a part 145 organisation.
That is if there nothing to fix or to renew which is almost never the case. So I always account for 4000-6000 euros a year for 100hr / annual inspection.
I do the 50 hour inspections myself and fix everything the regulations allow me as owner which helps with the costs. Otherwise 50 hr inspection would probably add another 1000-1500 euros on top.
I can add some data points for our aeroclub’s aircraft ARC.
Please mind that this is for the ARC only, and that each and every task that can be legally done as pilot/owner maintenance is done as such.
For those tasks that cannot be done solely under the pilot/owner privileges we try to send someone to assist the Part 145 company.
For the TMG, a new ARC is 250€.
The rest of the planes averages out at 1500€ per ARC. This is for a fleet of ten planes ranging from a L18C to a FWP-149D (1,8t retractable), including three C172 and two A210.
As another data point, we once asked for a quote for a regular 100h-inspection of an A210. The treasurer wanted this info so she could value our own maintenance work.
The quote was 2500€, just for the inspection, no ARC. 100h is the base interval of the A210, the plane has no 50h checks unless you run it on leaded fuel. This wasn’t our regular company that does the ARC, though. Needless to say we opted to continue to do the regular checks ourselves.
Hope that was helpful.
