I recognise the situation Peter sketches but luckily there are exceptions
One of my club PA28s is just making its way back from Gibraltar as we speak, two club pilot took it away last week. However as alluded to above letting people take aircraft away takes some planning and consideration, we had to anticipate the 50hour check and ensure training bookings are managed so we can cope without it. A few weeks of losing multiple training hours per day here in the UK while an aircraft sits out bad weather overseas could wreck our annual profit.
When I used to co-own flight school our policy was “Croatia and neighbouring countries” plus some near by airports in Austria and Italy (like Trieste and Graz) and return on the same day.
Fortunately my club has never had such a policy. I once made a week-long trip from Uppsala to Lisbon (32 flight hours in a PA28-181). Of course I had to be careful not to be caught out with a 50 or 100 hr check.
The problem is not the “policy”. The problem (or a question to debate) is who pays for the under-utilisation of the asset. Ultimately it has to be the customer, otherwise the school must go bust.
OTOH if you actually delivered 32 billable hours in 1 week, they would have been grateful 
and I cannot see why any school would object to that (unless it has only the one plane). Plus you were probably regarded as experienced (maybe with an IR) so not likely to get stuck somewhere.
The situation which most people complain about is that they cannot take the plane away for say 3 days, on which they run up just say 3 billable hours.
When I introduced the term “policy” further above I was referring to the rule that any trip to another country is basically organized by the outfit and every plane equipped with an instructor to maximize profits (in terms of revenue from instructing plus the aircraft charter). I wouldn’t put up with this as a customer. Someone compared this to renting a car and indeed that reveals how ridiculous such an idea really is. Where is the sense of freedom of flying in that?
I have to say that with the club that I joined, I do realize that it may be an exceptionally well organized one and the average club/school might not be so “easy”. It’s certainly about the mindset of the people running the club (all avid travelers) but Peter has a point in saying it somehow HAS to be financed. In that sense it’s got a lot to do with a critical mass. Most of the average clubs I think have few planes, so if one is away for an extended period of time, this causes problems. Our club currently has 13 aircraft and some 400 members (not all active). The fleet is rather homogeneous (PA28, C172, C182) and at least the PA28 are all quite new. Maintenance is done in-house by two full-time mechanics and if I take the plane for a longer period, I just arrange with them for the 50 hrs to be completed, if need-be. It would be the same if I owned the plane, wouldn’t it? The large fleet allows for people to take aircraft away even for several days while there’s still enough planes available in the hangar for anyone else. I never so far had the issue of NOT getting a plane booked when I wanted it. The club liaises for training with an adjacent school, who have their own fleet (in the same hangars), so the club’s fleet is not needed for a lot of training hours AFAIK (apart from check rides for new members etc.). Vice versa, the school doesn’t charter their fleet so it’s entirely available to students. I pay an hourly rate less than what some owners (who I spoke with) calculate as their hourly rate for less worthy types.
The situation which most people complain about is that they cannot take the plane away for say 3 days, on which they run up just say 3 billable hours.
Standard practice for a weekend get-away to the Frisian islands.
Clubs are run by the members and there are different ways of organizing the finances. In general newer aircraft requires to fly more for the same cost per hour than older. Newer aircraft also has a much higher availability. A new aircraft should therefore be used as much as possible, and leave the low utilisation for the older.
Patrick wrote:
Where is the sense of freedom of flying in that?
After I obtained my licence in 2003 I rented an airplane. The flight school asked me to come back on the same day as the aircraft was needed for the next day.
No freedom of flying, so it quickly became clear that I would need an own plane for flying places and crossing borders independent from reservations.
Just wanted to say that those EuroGA leaflets really do work. I can pretty well tell by looking at new signups when somebody has left a pile of them somewhere And every 10-20 new signups we get a nice new contributor.
A new aircraft should therefore be used as much as possible, and leave the low utilisation for the older.
But, have you seen the list price for a new C172, for example?
A new C-172 is about the same price as a VERY nice Cirrus SR22-G3
More questions? :-)
