The Rental Argument

The renting option is straightforward. You fly for an hour, you pay for an hour. There is no worry about maintenance costs, insurance or loan payments. Whether or not it maximizes the amount of flying I can do is another question.

We have to start with the assumption that my $1000 per month budget is all we have to deal with. The only airplane in the area that is capable of the performance that I require is an Extra 300L at Bedford, MA. The airplane is $372 per hour. Divide $1000 by $372 and we find that I will max out at 2.69 hours each month. That is 1.3 hours less than what I could manage if I owned an airplane.

Oh if only it were that simple! To rent the airplane I need 10 hours in it. I currently have 0.5 hours in an Extra. That leaves 9.5 hours left to go. These hours must be with an instructor that costs an additional $80 per hour. 9.5 hours of instruction in an Extra 300 totals $4,294. That means a little over four months of my entire budget would go towards getting checked out. Granted flying an Extra is just a little different and I could always use the instruction but that is a sizable chunk o’ change.

Complicating things further are contest costs. The Kathy Jaffe contest this past August set me back about $1500 total. I rented a Decathlon that was flown in from Bedford, MA but the cost of the airplane was split 5 ways. Even so, I still forked out $500 for my one hour spent in the airplane over the course of the weekend. Imagine the costs of ferrying the Extra to and from? I do not know how many people are checked out to fly the airplane but I am looking at increasing my costs substantially. Yes the Extra is much faster than the Decathlon and the time spent flying to and from the contest is less but it would have to do the flight there and back much faster than it is capable of to make the ferrying costs come out the same.

The potential ace up the sleeve of the rental argument is the maintenance. If the plane needs anything done to it, I am not responsible to pay that bill provided I did not cause the maintenance event. As I posted the other day, maintenance bills can skyrocket with airplanes. You think your car is expensive? Aint got nothin’ on no airplane.

So where does that leave us? I have no idea. I wanted to articulate the innards of the decisions I’m going to be making over the next year. 2011 is going to about setting myself up for future stuff. I don’t know that that differs much from how any year proceeds but at this point I have a much better understanding of how this whole world works, how I fit into it, and what I need to do.