Sebastian_G wrote:
Our local club had a SR20 and now sells it. Years before they had a Beech F33A and also sold it. The story was always the same. Cost per hour too high for the average club member. Too compley to fly for the average club member flying 10-20 hours / year. Maintenace more expensive than anticipated…
Did I understand you correctly that this was due to high fixed costs and low hours?
Another issue, at least with the SR22 Turbo, you need to be careful with management of Cylinder Head Temps. It takes some instruction and care to manage the engine, otherwise your engine life could be considerably shorter than TBO.
arj1 wrote:
Did I understand you correctly that this was due to high fixed costs and low hours?
Yes the final problem was lack of money. But the causes of this had been low hours and high fixed costs including especially unexpected maintenance.
Most club members have so little flying experience they are happy to be in the air at all and to collect flight hours. So they prefer a nice but cheaper and slower aircraft. The final nail in the coffin was the training required by the club. On one hand it is good to provide proper training but on the other hand if you make it too complicated only a small number of members will get it and fly that plane.
I have the following data point:
4 full years of flying the SR22T. 551 hrs flown. Cost £270 per hour. This includes 4 years of actual maintenance, insurance, hangarage, fuel, trip costs such as landing fees and parking etc. Recurrent training and subscriptions. That doesn’t include an engine fund cost, caps replacement in 2022 or the recent engine rebuild for the new camshaft.
Sebastian_G wrote:
Our local club had a SR20 and now sells it. Years before they had a Beech F33A and also sold it. The story was always the same. Cost per hour too high for the average club member. Too compley to fly for the average club member flying 10-20 hours / year. Maintenace more expensive than anticipated…
Yes I agree, you will get 2 members doing 20h/year and 20 members doing 2h/year on it which gives a total of 80h/year which is peanut utilisation given the high fixed costs and low marginal costs, that rental profile will give you headache for maintenance & availability & incidents/accidents & cancellations & politics, so you end up with 500$/h cost with no one renting being happy
I am sure with 4 owners doing 4*20h/year can easily make it 4*40h/year just as marginal cost to fly more is nothing to get and that extra 20h will fill up any availability
It’s the reason why in a syndicate or club, monthly fixed cost should be really expensive to cover everything even includes say 50h/year then getting a low hourly rate, so people are incentivised to fly more or just rethink their fixed budget…
The thing is that we don’t know a lot about how much $$$$$$ is floating around in 172driver’s club.
I recall multiple posts by @patrick (?) mentioning a German club which rents out this sort of hardware for not much money – and equally importantly and unusually – with few restrictions on how long you can take it away for. Clearly at that particular location there is a lot of €€€€€ being spent.
In the UK this would be harder although the “147” groups (search for 147KA) were doing plenty of flying with their "interesting “zero equity after you bought a block of hours” formula", at least for a while. It’s a question of how much froth can be found sitting on top of the mocha; it works like this
At a cheap cafe, the bit on top is nonexistent 
And, yeah, I know, the above is probably macchiato or cappucino
In the US, the whole maintenance scene is much simpler. In Europe, you can’t realistically have a rental business – even syndicates are very hard – around an N-reg (because almost everybody with FAA papers already has their own plane) and the maintenance scene around EASA-regs is fraught with issues; basically most companies won’t touch them unless everything comes with an EASA-1 form (yes I know this is bollox procedure, and we have many previous threads – example – but it is what you are stuck with) and that multiplies the operating costs on any plane which has a “past history” and thus consumes significant airframe parts.
Peter wrote:
It is actually a nose gear inner shaft. Cost £2k+, reported roughly every 2 years.
Not heard of that before
Sebastian_G wrote:
Years before they had a Beech F33A and also sold it. The story was always the same. Cost per hour too high for the average club member.
I tried it. I gave my Bonanza to a syndicate type club. Many members had requested something fast, a bit more exciting, a ‘go places aeroplane’. Until they had it and then did not want to pay to ‘’go places’’. The project failed. In part because the feedback from members was that the higher hourly cost for more speed, was not attractive. Also go places aeroplanes require more time, (the real issue IMO), more experience, more ratings etc. The sign off requirements become a bit more onerous. Higher insurance costs combined with higher pilot competency for the insurers.
Put it all together and you can see where there is a problem. My cost per hour for the Bo I estimate at £320.00. Based on 60 hours per annum.
So the Cirrus pilot that initially reported paying £2k for a “nose gear strut” / “nose gear inner shaft” every two years now “does not want to give permission” to name the part he previously gave two names for?
Is he also changing the turbo on his Porsche Taycan every two years?
I know the guy very well and have a photo of the said part.
