Flying Costs Archives - Golf Hotel Whiskey

Tips and resources for frugal pilots

Whether you are based in Europe or in the States where flying is definitely cheaper, its still going to be an expensive hobby for most pilots. However, there are some great resources and ways for frugal pilots to bring down the cost of flying in order to keep flying.

Dan Ramsey, the pilot blogger behind The Frugal Pilot as well as the author of Budget Flying: How to Earn Your Private Pilot License and other books on low-cost aviation, knows a thing or two about flying on a budget. He has also recently written an article for General Aviation News containing the following ten tips for frugal pilots:

Remember why you fly.
Keep it simple.
Manage your wants.
Be smart about aircraft maintenance.
Learn from your experiences.
Learn from smarter pilots.
Shop smarter.
Barter and trade as you can.
Multitask flying.
A frugal pilot is not a cheap pilot, nor an unsafe one.

Dan goes into some detail about each and every one of the above tips which are actually pretty simple and based on commonsense. However, a quick look at Dan’s website reveals a number of articles under the following categories:

Save on Instruction to help you cut the costs of getting a private pilot license.
Save on Aircraft to show you ways to lower the costs of finding your wings.
Save on Maintenance has proven ways of lowering the costs of flying a safe aircraft.
Save on Expenses to help you reduce operating costs so you can fly more on less.

In other words, Dan’s site is definitely worth checking out by UK or EU based pilots.

Tips for keeping flight training costs manageable

Let’s face it, flight training is an expensive passion but John Fiscus, the Chief Pilot of the Flight Academy, recently wrote a short post for the Cirrus Owners & Pilots Association (COPA) website with a few tips about how to keep flight training costs at a manageable level. Specifically, John had been asked on another forum whether or not it would be worth training in small bites whenever money was available or to just save up for a year+ in order to do it all at once.

John recommended that most people can go a week or 2 during the early stages of flight training and not experience a significant recession. However and beyond that, you will likely find yourself working hard to just do the basic things. Hence, John suggested establishing a personal minimum for time between flights because if you see yourself going a week or more between lessons, you will end up spending the entire next lesson attempting to get back to where you should be rather than learning a new skill. Its also important to study the books before even a first flight as filling your own head with knowledge will always be cheaper than paying someone else to do it for you.

Otherwise, saving up prior to training will allow you to pace yourself better with the best way to train being to spend several full days in a row and then a break for a few days in order to study and recuperate. Likewise, several consecutive half days can also work.

However, John advised NOT to let a flight school talk you into doing just an hour or two per session. After all, what’s good for the flight school (either because of scheduling constraints or because they want to earn more money off their students by having them train for a longer period of time) may not be best for you or for your budget.

Finally, John wrote that you should be very picky about your flight instructor. In other words, don’t let the flight school just assign you one without you having interviewed several. After all, there are often two types of flight instructors: Ones who are there to build up their hours and the ones who actually care about teaching you to fly.

Does the price of avgas impact how much you fly?

Kent Misegades has written a blog post repeated by General Aviation News about an interesting article in EAA’s November 2011 issue of Sport Aviation (“My $.02 on $6 Avgas”) which had pointed out that the price of avgas might be less important than you think.

In the article, author Mike Busch calculated the annual costs for his 1979 Cessna T310R twin under the assumption that he would fly less should the price of avgas rise from $4 to $6 per gallon:

His conclusion? The true impact of $6 avgas is less than what he initially thought and while it still hurts, it does not hurt enough for him to quit flying or to sell his airplane. Mike also included the following table of fuel cost estimates:

On the other hand, the Kent noted that not all pilots agree with Mike’s analysis and it cited a report from WINK News in Fort Myers, Florida where several pilots said higher fuel prices were killing the general aviation business.

Kent also noted how higher fuel prices have been hitting boat and marina owners along with drivers and he suggested that a smarter long-term idea would be to tap into autogas as well as exploit every drop of oil in North American.

Nevertheless, we want to ask you what you think about Mike’s analysis: Are you flying less thanks to higher fuel prices but actually saving more money or have avgas prices risen so much that you have or are thinking of giving up flying?

Business aviation up in arms over proposed European slot rules

Russ Niles, the Editor-in-Chief of AVweb has written a short article about business aviation in Europe being up in arms over recommendations in a consultant’s report to sharply reduce access to some European airports. Specifically, Russ mentioned the Steer Davies and Gleave Impact Assessment report to the European Commission (EC) which recommends that airport slots be allocated based on the number of passengers on board each aircraft and that this rule change could yield more than $7.1 billion in economic benefits by 2025.

However, the European Business Aviation Association (EBAA) has already called the proposal simplistic and seriously disruptive for business aviation. Moreover, EBAA President Brian Humphries has also pointed out that business aviation will generally avoid major airport hubs in favor of secondary and local airports in order to maximize efficiency for clients. On the other hand, airlines are now using smaller airports. Hence, the proposal could push business aviation out of its traditional operating areas.

Instead, the EBAA wants to guarantee slots to business aviation at secondary airports based on their historical usage of these airports. The EBAA has also noted that business aviation has made significant investments in the facilities at many of these secondary airports that the new proposal could push them out of.

Is affordable flying really out of reach?

Ron, the blogger behind the House of Rapp blog, has written a lengthy and informative post about affordable flying that is well worth reading by pilots and would-be pilots alike. Ron began his post by pointing out some startling flying statistics:

In 1980, the decennial census counted 226,545,805 people in the United States. That same year, the FAA reported more than 827,000 of those folks held pilot certificates. That’s about one out of every 300 people.
By the end of 2009, the U.S. population had climbed to nearly 30% to 307,000,000 while the pilot count had dropped by 25% to 594,000. Today less than one out out of every 500 Americans is a pilot.

And while explanations for the shrinking general aviation community have included everything from stepped up security at airports and increased litigation risks to even blaming flight instructors for high student pilot dropout rates, Ron concluded its due to the economy and the costs involved with flying.

However, Ron then wrote extensively about ways a pilot can lower their costs through partnerships and flying clubs. Moreover, he pointed out that you should not completely write-off owning your own aircraft because in a recent AOPA Online article, author Alton Marsh listed the following ten aircraft that you can purchase for less than $20,000:

1980 Piper Tomahawk
1953 Piper TriPacer
1961 Piper Colt
1961 Ercoupe
1972 Cessna 150
1946 Cessna 120
1946 Cessna 140
1946 Luscombe 8A
1946 Aeronca 11BC Super Chief
1946 Taylorcraft

With a typical 20 year aircraft loan, Ron pointed out that you could own a $20,000 aircraft for around $130 a month. Of course, maintenance and maintenance costs will always be a big question mark and an older aircraft may end up having a maintenance problem that will cost more to fix than the aircraft itself is worth.

Nevertheless, Ron’s point is simple: Flying will never be cheap but it can be affordable.

Does flying and flight training need to be expensive?

We know that flight training and flying can both be expensive, but does it need to be that way? According to Jamie Beckett, who recently wrote an article on the subject for General Aviation News, the answer is no.

Jamie began her article by writing that the high cost of flight training itself is the result of a simple math problem. Specifically, the math problem:

…can be expressed as the cost of the airplane per hour, plus the cost of the instructor per hour, times the number of hours required to become proficient. It looks like this: (COA + COI) X NOH = Cost of Flight Training.

However, Jamie also goes on to say that most would be pilots just walk into a flight school and start writing checks – after accepting whichever flight instructor was assigned to them. Moreover, to many would-be pilots do not go out and get references and find a flight instructor who they actually enjoy working with.

Jamie then writes about an alternative to the traditional flight school model where a flight school does not require students to rent an aircraft. Instead, Jamie suggested that a flight school sponsor a flying club with a reasonable rate or a flat rate to buy into the club. The rate could cover items like maintenance fees, hangar expenses and other administrative costs. Flying club members could then use the club’s aircraft at a very low hourly rate for instruction and then to remain current after receiving a pilot license. This would also help to avoid the problem of someone getting a pilot license and then realizing that they can’t afford the $150 an hour or whatever the price is to remain current.

Jamie believes that the above model would also open up general aviation and flight training to more potential pilots. Hence, Jamie Beckett’s entire article about the costs of flying and flight training is well worth reading and it should be noted that it has already gained more than 30 comments from readers that are also well worth browsing through.