For the TBM, half of the 250 € are already eaten up by route charges…
It just makes no sense to calculate only one part of the cost to make it look nicer
Flyer59, I believe you are involved in a business so you must be aware of the concept of marginal costing.
It’s not a fake. It’s 100% real. In this case it’s the cost of flying an extra hour. It is one of the best things about aircraft ownership. It encourages currency. It makes flying fun because it costs much less than everybody else tells you. I can fly my TB20 for less than I can rent a 1972 C152. The result is this
In a business, it could represent the profit made on selling one additional item. On that item, the gross profit is straight net profit, or as they say, it goes straight to the bottom line.
In both cases, you need to cover the fixed costs. But you take those on board when you buy a plane. After that, it’s all pure fun!
If you run an aviation business, you have to make sure you have enough business to cover the fixed costs, but after that the principle is all the same.
That’s how I count operating costs as well. I kind of mentally write the “cost of being in the club”-check at the 1st of January, and the rest is just fuel. So my plane is about $210/hr to operate. See, now it all makes sense and is even cheaper than airlines on some routes! 
A while ago I wrote about the cost of capabilities: http://www.stephan-schwab.com/2015/05/01/costs.html
@JasonC I love flying too. But cruise part of long trips usually isn’t exciting (view depends; sightseeing and getting somewhere fast usually doesn’t go well together). And aside from discipline and patience, I’m not really flexing my muscles, so to speak. Of course, I could fly myself instead of leaving it to George, it still wouldn’t be exciting very much. When I want to spend several hours hand-flying, I just go soaring (granted, you need weather to cooperate for that). It’s the same with cars. I love driving, but that doesn’t mean I’m enjoying myself on highways.
But that’s alright. Boring cruise means everything is going as planned and that’s a good thing. I prefer to get where I’m going alive and well. Fortunately, this isn’t relevant much for me within EU as the distances tend to be relatively short.
Peter, Adam,
that’s one way to look at it, sure. But it’s not the only one. In the end it costs the same – to have the airplane and to fly x hours.
The only way for me is: All fix costs + all variable costs / number of flown hours = cost per hour.
But i am a more simple kind of guy in these things. And i don’t care how much it is as long i can pay for it. I can write off 50 percent of the cost from my tax, and that’s fine. The last shirt will have no pockets :-)
The only problem with counting all costs per year per hour, is that you will have wildly different operational costs year to year. Which is fine, but it’s not a useful number to base anything on. Only real way is to divide the total costs from day one the day you sell it. That’s when one gets the real number.
Flyer59 wrote:
The last shirt will have no pockets
Now that’s an interesting saying, never heard it before !
Michael
He didn’t tell you about the trousers
We all know that private flying is not cheap and will never be, it is all around what can we afford and if we are willing to pay for it. I know a guy who lives in the US, every year he hires a jet and comes over for a month, then flys back the same way.
If I could afford it I would have a TBM and fly it to my holiday home in Italy, then continue to see the family in Israel…for a lunch in Paris etc.
As for the numbers about oil change in the C421 that Adam provided I think that $250/50h are too high.
When I got one of my annual bills I wanted to cry, it was £5000. The engineer who stood by me pointed at a Citation that one pan of its windshields had to be replaced, they have just pulled it out of the box. I was told that this was about $40k. I felt a bit better.
Logic and GA are two different things. We just try to fool ourselves that we are making logical/commercial decisions and that we save money when we don’t.
Enjoy what ever you fly and don’t do the calculations, reality will take the fun out of your flying.
