Owning your own airplane for flight training?

Guess I have been incorrect in thinking relevance to GA was part of the drill.

Ron Levy said:
Just sayin' -- if I know of two P&W engines which require resetting the fuel controls, there may be others.
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I flew 2 hours today and it cost me $80 in gas. If Ihad rented it would have cost $220. However I have fixed costs like hanger/insurance/mx/etc. I also own the most numerous plane ever built so the insurance isnt bad and every A&P knows how to work on them.
 
DavidWhite said:
I flew 2 hours today and it cost me $80 in gas. If Ihad rented it would have cost $220. However I have fixed costs like hanger/insurance/mx/etc. I also own the most numerous plane ever built so the insurance isnt bad and every A&P knows how to work on them.
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There are two airports by me, one of them holds all the air tankers and is a fire fighting base. The other is a non towered but small airport with hangers and tie downs. If I got my license and flew in that club, I would have to deposit 1200, and pay 30 bucks a month, and rent the planes for 120 an hour.. THAT'S EXPENSIVE! Am I missing something here? Why would anyone join a club when owning a simple Cessna 172 or piper archer are apparently cheap to maintains and cheap on insurance?
I'm like a deer in headlights with all this stuff
 
DavidWhite said:
I flew 2 hours today and it cost me $80 in gas. If Ihad rented it would have cost $220. However I have fixed costs like hanger/insurance/mx/etc. I also own the most numerous plane ever built so the insurance isnt bad and every A&P knows how to work on them.
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You also have the acquisition cost of your airplane which, for whatever reason, many owners don't seem to include when talking about the cost of flying.
 
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HatTrickHero11 said:
There are two airports by me, one of them holds all the air tankers and is a fire fighting base. The other is a non towered but small airport with hangers and tie downs. If I got my license and flew in that club, I would have to deposit 1200, and pay 30 bucks a month, and rent the planes for 120 an hour.. THAT'S EXPENSIVE! Am I missing something here? Why would anyone join a club when owning a simple Cessna 172 or piper archer are apparently cheap to maintains and cheap on insurance?
I'm like a deer in headlights with all this stuff
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cheap is relative. Relative to most other airplanes Skyhawks are cheap to insure and easy to get parts for. That being said I had to replace 2 primer lines @ $300 each direct from Cessna.
 
HatTrickHero11 said:
What do you exactly mean?
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David said...
I flew 2 hours today and it cost me $80 in gas. If I had rented it would have cost $220. However I have fixed costs like hanger/insurance/mx/etc.
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But he didn't include the amount he paid to purchase the airplane. If it's financed he makes payments. If he paid cash then there is the opportunity cost. He could have done something else with the money such as investing it or paying for something else such as school.

I think it's been a good deal for him because he has been flying a lot, getting ratings, and trying to build time, but I'll let him speak for himself.

However if, as you have written, you haven't yet saved $10,000 for flying lessons it's going to be a real stretch for you to buy and maintain an airplane. You need to take your own financial situation and tolerance for risk into account because you could have a big unexpected maintenance problem which could make your airplane unairworthy unless you have the money to cover the repair.
 
Oh, ok. I understand now. I thought buying an airplane would save a ton but it seems that it's a risky buy at this point in time. I'm pretty sure I will just have to wait till my career takes off and my school debt is gone, then I can think of buying a plane.
 
Everskyward said:
David said... But he didn't include the amount he paid to purchase the airplane. If it's financed he makes payments. If he paid cash then there is the opportunity cost. He could have done something else with the money such as investing it or paying for something else such as school.

I think it's been a good deal for him because he has been flying a lot, getting ratings, and trying to build time, but I'll let him speak for himself.

However if, as you have written, you haven't yet saved $10,000 for flying lessons it's going to be a real stretch for you to buy and maintain an airplane. You need to take your own financial situation and tolerance for risk into account because you could have a big unexpected maintenance problem which could make your airplane unairworthy unless you have the money to cover the repair.
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That's the dice roll we all take when buying a plane. No I did not have 20K sitting in a bank account the day I bought my plane to cover a new overhaul in case the engine decided to start eating itself. Some say you should be able to afford whatever Murphy has to throw at you, I say live a little but do your due diligence.
 
What about the idea of storing your plane at your home, (if you have land to do so) and flying it off you land, would insurance get picky about that?
 
HatTrickHero11 said:
What about the idea of storing your plane at your home, (if you have land to do so) and flying it off you land, would insurance get picky about that?
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They could, I don't recall ever seeing that in my policy (and yes I read it all) they do ask where the aircraft is based at but I thought that was just to see if it was in a hangar vs a tie down, they charge more for tie downs.
 
What do they classify as a "hanger" I mean I could build a little shack around on and enclose it to keep it from the Elements of mother nature.
 
HatTrickHero11 said:
Oh, ok. I understand now. I thought buying an airplane would save a ton but it seems that it's a risky buy at this point in time. I'm pretty sure I will just have to wait till my career takes off and my school debt is gone, then I can think of buying a plane.
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Good plan.
 
HatTrickHero11 said:
What about the idea of storing your plane at your home, (if you have land to do so) and flying it off you land, would insurance get picky about that?
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Does your home sit on a piece of land that has space for a runway? We're talking half a mile or so of solid, level ground without significant lumps or bumps, and clear approaches at each end.
 
Nothing wrong with doing that, lots do and insurance won't have too much of a problem with it.

$120 / hr for a nice 172 or whatever is not so bad.

I learned to fly in a club with $70/hr C152's. Great deal. In a month or two i'm going to fork over the $600 extra required deposit and fly the 170kt M20J's for $155/hr cause I will now meet the insurance requirements (150hrs, instrument rated)
 
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I'm just planning my first airplane. I know when I'm older and buy a house I want a lot of land so might as well plan for a dirt or grass airstrip
 
DavidWhite said:
I flew 2 hours today and it cost me $80 in gas. If Ihad rented it would have cost $220. However I have fixed costs like hanger/insurance/mx/etc. I also own the most numerous plane ever built so the insurance isnt bad and every A&P knows how to work on them.
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Your Nebraska repair bill would have paid for 125 hours in the Cessna 150.
 
HatTrickHero11 said:
What about the idea of storing your plane at your home, (if you have land to do so) and flying it off you land, would insurance get picky about that?
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That's the theory that every residential airpark is based upon.
 
HatTrickHero11 said:
120 an hour is good? That's killer for sOmeone like me!
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For a relatively new Cessna 172, yes, it is good. $140-150/hour isn't uncommon. The aircraft owner is paying off a quarter-million dollar airplane, and the interest alone is going to run a thousand or two a month, not to mention depreciation. Fuel is going to run nearly $50/hour, and then there's mainenance, overhaul reserve, insurance (probably $10K a year for a 172 like that used for student training in a commercial flight school), hangar/tiedown, etc. Add it all up, and that's what it has to rent for to make a profit. Even a ratty old Cessna 152 is probably going to run $85/hour these days what with the cost of fuel and insurance.
 
And the sad part is that no matter the cost, nobody in the ownership equation is making any money.
Ron Levy said:
For a relatively new Cessna 172, yes, it is good. $140-150/hour isn't uncommon. The aircraft owner is paying off a quarter-million dollar airplane, and the interest alone is going to run a thousand or two a month, not to mention depreciation. Fuel is going to run nearly $50/hour, and then there's mainenance, overhaul reserve, insurance (probably $10K a year for a 172 like that used for student training in a commercial flight school), hangar/tiedown, etc. Add it all up, and that's what it has to rent for to make a profit. Even a ratty old Cessna 152 is probably going to run $85/hour these days what with the cost of fuel and insurance.
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man, if you can't afford to rent a $120 hr plane a few times a month, you can't afford a plane by yourself..

Best bet is to get your license at a club, have some fun with it, and once you are a PPL find some friends and buy a plane. If you get something like a C152, (not including purchase price) it will cost you and two others about $100/month and $50/hr to fly
 
Ron Levy said:
Jet fuel is a wide-cut kerosene product that only works in turbine and diesel* aircraft engines. AvGas is a more refined product that works properly in piston engines, and can work in an emergency (if you reset the fuel controls) in turbine engines.

*The only light aircraft that comes from the factory with a diesel engine (well, actually, two diesel engines) is the Diamond DA-42 TwinStar. There are retrofit diesels available for some light singles, but they are very expensive to purchase and install, and you'd have to pump a lot of jet fuel through them to make the conversion worth whilen, and I've not seen many of them out there.
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Nearby traffic planes operator converted one, found it worthwhile. But he flies more hours in a year than many do in their lifetime.
 
Lots of good reasons to own a plane for your flight training. Cost effectiveness isn't likely one of them. Availability is the key. I still kick myself for not getting a plane earlier nor getting one for my wife to use during her primary training.
 
flyingron said:
Lots of good reasons to own a plane for your flight training. Cost effectiveness isn't likely one of them. Availability is the key. I still kick myself for not getting a plane earlier nor getting one for my wife to use during her primary training.
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Remember what I said earlier about $5K being "chump change." If you have the financial means to buy an airplane for training without worrying much about the financial consequences (and while I know FRon isn't Bill Gates, I know he ain't on welfare, either :D), I say go for it. But for someone who thinks $120 an hour (and that doesn't even include the instructor) is "a killer," it's out of the financial question.
 
Well my thought of asking this question was to get information from people who have been there. I had very little intention of buying a simple airplane, unless it scratched the PPL at least half the cost. This obvious isn't the case. I need to sit on this information and run it through my head over and over.

The only reason I think 120 an hour is expensive is because I'm only 20! That's a lot of money for someone who doesn't have a career going and is only in college haha. Like I said, education is going to be worth a lot more in the future than it is now and that's first on my list.

I looked up some airplanes that they say are the cheapest to own using that site called Plane Quest. Have anyone of you used this site? Overal they said about 8,000 a year with fixed/Variable costs a year. And these are airplanes that "sip gas" as someone stated earlier. That doesn't sound to bad. I'm not looking for new, anything air worthy, that isn't a glider
 
HatTrickHero11 said:
I looked up some airplanes that they say are the cheapest to own using that site called Plane Quest. Have anyone of you used this site? Overal they said about 8,000 a year with fixed/Variable costs a year. And these are airplanes that "sip gas" as someone stated earlier. That doesn't sound to bad. I'm not looking for new, anything air worthy, that isn't a glider
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$8000 a year total ownership cost? Well, I suppose you can do that if you don't fly it very much, keep it outside, and do most of the maintenance yourself, but if you're working on your PPL, you're going to want to fly more than that.

Look at it this way -- typical PPL takes about 60 hours these days. Even if the aircraft burns only 5 gph, that's 300 gallons of fuel at $5/gallon, or $1500 just for the gas. And then, after doing that in say, four months or so, the airplane would be sitting idle for the other eight months of the year. Add in storage cost, maintenance, insurance, annual inspection, etc. ,and $8000/year isn't going to buy you a lot of flight hours.

And that doesn't even begin to figure the cost of buying the airplane itself. Do you have the cash to buy it? Seems to me you said up above that you'd need to save to have the $10K to pay for PP flight training. In that case, you'd be borrowing another $20K or more to buy a plane in which to train, and the payments on that are going to be another few hundred a month.

All in all, in your financial situation, it just doesn't make sense.

OTOH, if your folks have that sort of cash laying around, and you can convince them that they need to learn to fly too...
 
HatTrickHero11 said:
Well my thought of asking this question was to get information from people who have been there. I had very little intention of buying a simple airplane, unless it scratched the PPL at least half the cost. This obvious isn't the case. I need to sit on this information and run it through my head over and over.

The only reason I think 120 an hour is expensive is because I'm only 20! That's a lot of money for someone who doesn't have a career going and is only in college haha. Like I said, education is going to be worth a lot more in the future than it is now and that's first on my list.

I looked up some airplanes that they say are the cheapest to own using that site called Plane Quest. Have anyone of you used this site? Overal they said about 8,000 a year with fixed/Variable costs a year. And these are airplanes that "sip gas" as someone stated earlier. That doesn't sound to bad. I'm not looking for new, anything air worthy, that isn't a glider
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I bought a 150 with a friend to train and kept it a few years. Got most of my money back out and didn't loose much to maintenance. Way cheaper than the rental, and every time I did try and rent an airplane the damn thing was busted.

Had I rented at $100/hr for all the time I flew that 150 I'd have blown 30 grand without having a damn thing to show for it. And I would have never taken those awesome trips that really taught me more about how to fly than any CFI ever did.

BTDT, and that's my 2 cents. I haven't read through all this, sorry, but I bet the naysayers don't own airplanes.
 
Steingar - Have you sold your airplane? What were you monthly/ Yearly costs for owning one of them?

So maybe, if my friend buys a cheap airplane, we could possibly split it and all will be fine hopefully.

How often do planes need to be serviced? Do single engine aircraft have to get overhauls on the engine? If so, how often? And how much does that cost?

I also want a motorcycle as my vehicle of choice so maybe I will have to get that to get my mind preoccupied haha.
 
steingar said:
I bought a 150 with a friend to train and kept it a few years. Got most of my money back out and didn't loose much to maintenance. Way cheaper than the rental, and every time I did try and rent an airplane the damn thing was busted.

Had I rented at $100/hr for all the time I flew that 150 I'd have blown 30 grand without having a damn thing to show for it. And I would have never taken those awesome trips that really taught me more about how to fly than any CFI ever did.

BTDT, and that's my 2 cents. I haven't read through all this, sorry, but I bet the naysayers don't own airplanes.
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Ron Levy said:
$8000 a year total ownership cost? Well, I suppose you can do that if you don't fly it very much, keep it outside, and do most of the maintenance yourself, but if you're working on your PPL, you're going to want to fly more than that.

Look at it this way -- typical PPL takes about 60 hours these days. Even if the aircraft burns only 5 gph, that's 300 gallons of fuel at $5/gallon, or $1500 just for the gas. And then, after doing that in say, four months or so, the airplane would be sitting idle for the other eight months of the year. Add in storage cost, maintenance, insurance, annual inspection, etc. ,and $8000/year isn't going to buy you a lot of flight hours.

And that doesn't even begin to figure the cost of buying the airplane itself. Do you have the cash to buy it? Seems to me you said up above that you'd need to save to have the $10K to pay for PP flight training. In that case, you'd be borrowing another $20K or more to buy a plane in which to train, and the payments on that are going to be another few hundred a month.

All in all, in your financial situation, it just doesn't make sense.

OTOH, if your folks have that sort of cash laying around, and you can convince them that they need to learn to fly too...
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Well my Dad is an optometrist, and he needs to get so many hours of continuing education each year to maintain his license to practice. So I could fly the plane to those places so he doesn't have to go to the airport constantly and can get me some hours
 
HatTrickHero11 said:
Steingar - Have you sold your airplane? What were you monthly/ Yearly costs for owning one of them?.
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I bought for $19K, and sold for $15K three years and 300 hours later. Airplane cost about $700-800/year for insurance, and less for maintenance. Probably $500/year total. Tied down for free. Gas was about 6 gallons an hour.

HatTrickHero11 said:
So maybe, if my friend buys a cheap airplane, we could possibly split it and all will be fine hopefully.
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If all you do is train, no way. But if you train and fly it a few years, well worth it, especially if you use it for your IR. Nothing like training in the aircraft you're actually going to fly. That said, if you're going to do your IR, you want an aircraft that's IFR capable out of the box. Partnerships like this work really well, especially if you're already pals. That's so long as everyone pays in.

HatTrickHero11 said:
How often do planes need to be serviced? Do single engine aircraft have to get overhauls on the engine? If so, how often? And how much does that cost?
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Aircraft need at minimum an annual inspection, which is the real wild card. Mine runs about $1000/year, but that can vary about a fold and a half. What one spends on maintenance will depend on the aircraft and the mechanic. Owners can do stuff to defray those costs, and of course having an A&P in the partnership can do wonders for your maintenance costs. Manufacturers recommend TBOs (Time Between Overhauls) which for most aircraft will run around 2000 hours or 12 years. Most aircraft for sale will have both the airframe time and the engine time indicated prominently.

HatTrickHero11 said:
I also want a motorcycle as my vehicle of choice so maybe I will have to get that to get my mind preoccupied haha.
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The thing is you can get a perfectly good airplane for what a full dress touring motorcycle costs. And, if you did your purchase correctly, you can sell that airplane for the same price you bought it. And, prices for aircraft are at historic lows. Drive the bike off the lot and you just halved the price.

The other thing is aircraft are a part of our history. They are part and parcel of America's technological prowess, manufacturing ability, and engineering excellence. In owning one, you are preserving a piece of our past for the people of our future. Rental aircraft are a commodity to make money for an FBO. Owned airplanes are objects of love, and it often shows. Rent a few aircraft, and then go look at the ones for sale. I bet you'll see what I mean.
 
If you buy a $20,000 airplane, and couldn't afford the very next day to turn around and put $15,000 into the airplane, you can't afford to own it. Just my opinion.
 
steingar said:
Ever owned an airplane?
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Nope. Because I don't think I can afford it. But I've worked with plenty of people who have bought airplanes and needed to put substantial amounts of money into it the next week. You need to be accepting of the possibility and able to handle it before you purchase.

No matter how well the pre-buy is, or how well you researched, it can happen. People need to be aware of that.
 
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