What Does It Really Cost to Own and Fly Your Own Plane?

what's up guys welcome back to the hangar today I've got to do an oil change and I figured it would be a good time for me to talk about not only the cost of maintenance but the cost of aircraft ownership it's been requested a ton of times in the comments so I figured today's my day let's address that let's get into what it costs to own an airplane I'm Trent Palmer it's like drones for a living and Bush planes for fun follow along as I journey off the beaten path of aviation [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] alright guys now that we got the oil change it's time for me to dive into this now full transparency here I have been avoiding this video for a while mainly because I don't even want to know the numbers I'm someone that likes to turn a blind eye to and things are very expensive there's no if ands or buts about it having an airplane is a lot more expensive than not having an airplane so if you're hoping I'm gonna like change your mind on that that's not gonna happen also there's a lot of different ways that people will evaluate costs that go into an airplane and how to factor an hourly rate there's things like fixed costs like a hangar rent and then there's operating costs that would be like gas and oil and then there's reserved cost which would be like saving up for your next engine overhaul your tire replacement all the wear and tear items would kind of be money you would put aside in a reserved area so that when an expensive thing comes up you have money for that now full disclosure I have never done this math before I just try to avoid it so I'm not gonna be super accurate with it because I don't think it really helps anywhere you are in the country any time of the year you're gonna have different costs just starting from fuel and oil but obviously hangar rent and every different airplane is gonna vary drastically so we'll start this off with aircraft acquisition the first big cost that people are looking at if you're thinking about getting into an airplane is buying the actual airplane now again full transparency I bought in a different day and age when I was looking for an airplane there was a ton of inventory on the market especially Kitfox wise there were so many of them out there that it was a buyers market I was able to get this one for 39 grand which was basically a steal and since then obviously have pretty much rebuilt the whole plane but that said there are many affordable options and affordable ways to get into an airplane I have friends that are flying airplanes that they bought for twenty thousand dollars and they go out and have a great time there's a ton of ways to get into an aircraft whether it be a partnership or buying one with a loan or something like that they have awesome financing for airplanes that's a longer term than a car one so normally the payments aren't horrible via that covers the first part of just the acquisition stage I paid 39 grand at this point I have no idea how much I have into it a lot more than that but hopefully it's worth at least as much as I have into it and that is the other thing I did want to touch on airplanes as a whole tend to appreciate unlike cars when you drive one off the lot that you lose ten thousand dollars on it when you buy a used aircraft for the most part they hold their value pretty dang well if not appreciate so from that sense as long as you maintain it it's a fairly sound investment and moving our way into operational cost so for my plane again it's a very simple airplane it's not complex high performance any of that it's just run-of-the-mill fixed gear single engine aircraft and it's run in a row tax so my fuel burn at the speed I typically cruise that is about five gallons per hour now I can run car gas or aviation gas car gas right now I believe 491 is in the $3.00 range half gas is in the five dollar range around here so we'll just round to the middle and say about four dollars per gallon I'm burning five gallons per hour that's going to put me at about twenty bucks an hour in fuel now inside of that there's not much else that goes into the engine obviously oil I do change my oil every 25 hours and to do an oil change is about 63 bucks 62 bucks that ends up being about two dollars and fifty cents an hour and oil change so if you factor those two together you end up at $22.50 now really quickly as we move away from the topic of the cost of aircraft maintenance it is time that we talk about the cost of your own personal maintenance which brings us to the sponsor of this video Harry's the idea of Shaving has always been a nuisance to me and then add to that when you go buy a razor that you're gonna use it a few times and then that blade goes dull and all of a sudden you're getting a horrible shave with razor burn and all that and then you go back to get replacements find that there are $35 and it's locked you have to go get someone to even get just a nightmare dealing with razors the good news is it doesn't have to be 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three dollars that's normally thirteen dollars so you're getting an awesome deal and again you're supporting my channel by doing so thanks again to Harry's for sponsoring this video let's get back into it now the second section I like to break this into is fixed costs now these things are completely independent of how many hours you put on the plane every year the first fixed cost I'm gonna talk about is hanger now for me I do like keeping my plane in a hangar I do actually have the option to fold the wings and bring it home if I don't want to pay for a hanger I could put it in my garage and that's actually one of the selling points for me of the kit box was that if I decided I hit a point where I wasn't flying all that much or I came on hard times money-wise it would be something that I could offset the cost of the hanger by just bringing the plane home which is a nice feature but basically I paid 300 a month for rent here a pretty good deal for the field I'm at but that's gonna vary depending on where you are in the country and how many hangars are even open because a lot of airports these days it's really hard to find hangar space now the second thing would be insurance now again full disclosure my insurance is probably a lot higher than most others the reason being I am at the highest end of the the price bracket that any insurance would even allow for a Kitfox because most gift boxes at least the older ones are a lot less expensive than what I've now put into mine so I have it as a cleaned whole value of one hundred and twenty five grand and right there that sifted out a whole bunch of providers didn't want to even cover me and the other thing I did fully disclose to my insurance brokers that I do a lot of off field landings and I know most policies don't exclude that but I just wanted to make sure that look if I go out and have any issue when I'm out there I'm to be covered so I think that actually sifted out every other insurance provider aside from one so I'm now at about 2400 a year or 200 a month just an insurance insurance is one of those things that it sucks paying for it but it really sucks even more not having it but again this is an experimental aircraft it is tail wheel those are two things that ding it pretty bad when it comes to insurance a third and really last fixed cost is subscriptions for the arm and pilot or for flight I'm a Garmin guy so I've got Garmin pilot that's about 200 a year I think I pay for the overall subscription to have all those databases and all the updates and the one last thing is your annual inspection or on an experimental and annual condition inspection which is a lot cheaper because it's just done with an EMP mechanic and not an ia and I normally spend I think around five hundred bucks on that inspection every year it's something that I get a mechanic friend to help me out with and I go through the whole plane I work with him so that's not a super expensive cost again a certified aircraft that's gonna vary drastically totally depends on if you have retracts you know complex multi all of that is going to add to it I've heard horror stories of people coming out i annual happen to pay you know ten fifteen twenty thousand dollars and luckily with the experimental normally that's not the case so it's a little cheaper on that front so total for the year in fixed costs which again this is why I didn't want to do this but it looks like we're about thirty six hundred for hangar rent twenty four hundred for insurance that puts me at six grand right there five hundred for the annual condition inspection and then two hundred for the maps so that puts me at a whopping total of sixty seven hundred dollars in fixed costs again since the fixed costs are totally separate from your operating costs the cost per hour actually goes down the more you fly when you look at it from that standpoint now I fly about a hundred and fifty hours a year the average private pilot flies I think about fifty hours a year so we're gonna factor that I'm about three times as much as the average Private Pilot here in the United States so when we take that $6,700 fixed cost and divide it by 150 hours that leaves us at about forty four dollars an hour in that fixed cost now I add that to the twenty two fifty that are my operating cost and that puts me at about sixty six fifty per hour to fly my plane now this is where it gets a little more confusing because a lot of pilots like to factor for overhauls and you know wear and tear and replacement parts or upgrading avionics any of that that would be kind of considered a reserved cost that's saying I'm gonna put money aside for every hour knowing that at this amount of hours I'm gonna have to pay for something that's large now I was looking at doing the math for this but there's again just too many variables the 915 that I'm flying that brand new engine is so new that I actually haven't been able to find that true number for what an overhaul would cost because I don't know if there's been anyone in the GA market that's pushed it through T Bo now T Bo time between overhauls on this engine is currently set at 1200 but the plan is once there's enough fleet hours out there it'll go up to 2,000 so right there that changed between 1,200 and 2,000 is a pretty wide spread if you're trying to factor for an hourly rate but it probably wouldn't hurt if you threw an extra $50 an hour off to the side and said that's my rainy day fund when something goes wrong with the plane I will be able to pay for that because again there are so many little things wear and tear items tires wear out and again tires being so vastly different in cost and wear times that I don't even want to do the math on it my first set of 29 inch bush wheels I went through in about 300 hours landing almost exclusively on pavement so that cost me about $10 an hour given that the set was almost $3,000 if I was flying off grass or dirt like I plan on doing I hear of people going well north of a thousand hours and all of a sudden that cost got dropped down to about three dollars down so anyway I'm going back to the overall cost that I planned for and see is that about sixty six dollars an hour covers all my fixed and operating costs anyway guys that is enough of numbers and math so I'm gonna wrap this one up here I hope you guys enjoyed it I hope it lent a little bit of insight to someone that's thinking about buying an airplane and wondering what the rough costs are again I'm not saying these are concrete and I know you guys are gonna chew me up in the comments for it but I'm okay with that so you know the drill like this video if you do subscribe if you have it come be my wingman see you on the next one peace

Channel: Trent Palmer

Views: 424,276

Rating: 4.9071755 out of 5

Keywords: cost of owning an airplane, how much do airplanes cost, airplane cost, plane cost, plane price, used airplane, buying an airplane, buying a plane, flying, pilot, aviation, bush plane, trent palmer, super cub, supercub, monster cub, monstercub, draco, experimental, airplane, freedomfox, airplane crash, plane, landing, tailwheel, instruction, flight training, low and slow, STOL, first solo, student pilot, flying cowboys, freedom fox, helicopter, first flight, flitetest, aircraft, EAA, DIY

Id: yvSKcQQzE-Q

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 03 2020