Aircraft fuel cost is a negligible part of my yearly expenses, it would make no difference to my life it were zero or doubled. I own a plane about 8000 hrs a year, and can use it any one of those hours. That’s what’s important to me.
Annual hangar rent is enough to make a difference if it were gone from the budget, but I use the hangar as a supplement to my house and my life, not just a place to store a plane. I have quite a bit going on in the hangar at any given time – I have two planes, three cars and nine motorcycles, some of them are there. I don’t need all of them, but owning and enjoying them is one of the bigger reasons I get out of bed in the morning… and that’s enough justification 
JasonC wrote:
I managed the final twelve months in the Mustang all costs excluding depreciation for £690/hour.
That’s just one year. Kind of difficult to make any generalizations by just picking " a " year out of the hat and holding it up as an example. This is all the more ancedotal since there was a purchase and sale in that period.
I have some years where the cash flow has been very positive,
Just sell the plane for more than the price to buy it and operate it over the ownership period.
Michael wrote:
That’s just one year. Kind of difficult to make any generalizations by just picking " a " year out of the hat and holding it up as an example. This is all the more ancedotal since there was a purchase and sale in that period.
Not at all. A completely normal year and has nothing to do with a sale.
JasonC wrote:
A completely normal year and has nothing to do with a sale.
You mean purchase / sale events were not taken into account or ?
I am afraid to post the annual expenses on flying, what if my wife finds out? She would put antifreeze on my coffee
Michael wrote:
You mean purchase / sale events were not taken into account or ?
It is a full year of operation as I said. Nothing to with a purchase or a sale neither of which took place in the relevant period. Why be so aggressive?
EuroFlyer wrote:
So, all in all, 300-ish /hr.
I budget 320.00 for the 35. However I also thought we were talking about the annual costs to an owner of operating their aeroplane. Couple of years ago in a similar thread I quoted 28k per annum and fly 60-70 hours. This for the Bonanza.
I always find these threads about running costs very subjective and its all about the type you fly, frequency, and maintenance.
I like Silvaire’s approach
Silvaire wrote:
Every other aspect of my financial life isn’t tracked to the penny, investments etc bounce up and down daily as much as the plane is worth, entirely outside of my control, and I have no reason to track non-repetitive aircraft costs to the dollar, or correlate them to hours flown.
Buy the asset and use it. If not using it, get rid.
BeechBaby wrote:
I always find these threads about running costs very subjective and its all about the type you fly, frequency, and maintenance.
Well, the way i described it, it isn’t subjective. It is entirely empirical. You spend x in total in cash terms. x depends on how much you fly of course. It is when people go about making loads of adjustments it becomes subjective.
I simply have no easy way of adding it up, especially if I am to separate out discretionary items. I strongly believe an aircraft owner should be very comfortable with his/her ability to pay for it, and once this ceases to be the case then it is time to re-evaluate what one is doing, rather than shrink one’s flying to the point where you get in and look around for the hole to put the key into, and end each transmission with “over”
I reckon the TB20 has a DOC (direct operating cost i.e. the cost of flying one extra hour) of about £130/hr. And my highest-hour year was 2014 which was about 190hrs.
This figure is based on doing a decent proportion of higher altitude IFR flights where the fuel burn is around 10 USG/hr in cruise, and on avgas costing £2/litre. Obviously if you were doing 190hrs a year out of LGST, you could double the DOC
The fixed costs I posted in the links in post #25 above. Insurance has come down quite a bit lately (soft market I guess).
One of several reasons why I have not gone to the homebuilt route is that it would save me very little money but would utterly cripple me on the ability to go places. If you look at where the costs go, and do any significant number of hours a year, it isn’t on replacing lifed parts or expensive avionics.
BeechBaby wrote:
I like Silvaire’s approach
I wouldn’t rent planes if I didn’t own one because I wouldn’t enjoy dealing with different planes & owners every time I fly, so for me I can’t see how calculating costs per hour flown has any utility. It’s not like I get paid for flying by the hour, and can compare that with operational costs to calculate profit or loss. I get paid periodically for working and the majority of my aircraft expenses are paid monthly. With that situation the plane is kept ready in the hangar and I can fly it whenever I want and have time. The opportunity cost is owning something else that I’d budget and use the same way. Nothing except total ownership expense over calendar time, mostly being fixed costs is relevant to my interests.
BeechBaby wrote:
Buy the asset and use it. If not using it, get rid.
That’s never been something I’ve wanted to do, personally. Mostly I don’t buy things unless I really want them and can afford them indefinitely, and then I don’t often sell unless it’s a car or other disposable item that eventually becomes worn out, unrepairable and valueless. Everybody is different in that regard and there is a cost to be paid to maintain anything you own, but I like buying and holding what is ‘forever quality’ stuff in my mind, regardless of whether I’m using it a lot in any given period of time. A good storage situation helps a lot in that regard, and is an essential element in my setup.
