@Peter what are you trying to find out? I am loath the publish our club’s accounts as you would have to have some knowledge of French historic accounting practices to understand them. They also at many clubs include bar sales etc.
Our club is an association in the French law. The committe is voted each year at an AGM and it is open to all full members to put themselves forward for the committee and all full members can vote on all matters brought forward at the AGM. Once the committee is formed they then select a president, treasurer, secretary and any other posts as needed. If there are not enough members on the committee to fill all the posts they can ask other members, not on the committee, îf they are prepared to lend a hand.
No one is paid for their services.
Every member pays an annual subscription, Those who flies the club planes pay €120 p/a under 25s pay half price, ULM pilots pay about the same as under 25s IIRC and we also have a few associate members who pay around €30 per annum.
PPL pilots will also pay for an FFA licence and ULM flyers will more than likely be members of FFPLUM.IIRC the annual fees are around €150
All stakeholders have a say on the fleet and when to buy, sell, and what to buy and sell.
Then comes the question of financing if it is decided to buy. It is more than likely that a loan would be needed, unless treasury has managed to build up a fund which has not otherwise been used. In the last 30 years that has only ever been achieved by reducing the number of aircraft in the fleet.
So any shortfall is usually made up as an interest free loàn from members who are able to (loaning money to the club can incur tax advantages for the individual). The rest will be a bank loan.
The committe then calculates all the outgoings, loan interest, fuel, insurance, and anticipated future maintenance (building a reserve to cover new engine etc). Depreciation will also be accounted for.
This will then be divided up into an hourly rate which will allow these costs to be covered for the coming year.
At present DA40D €155p/h Uper Guépard €80 per hout.
For instruction, controls etc there is a double command rate of €20 p/h on both.
Members can book the aircraft online. If no one has reseeved for the next 3 or 4 days there is nothing stopping me booking the aircraft for those 3 or 4 days. I simply make an online booking. The only restiction is that I would need to agree to do more than 4 hours flying during those 4 days. But if no one else wants the aircraft this limitation is waived.
I love owning my own aircraft for all the usual reasons. I do what work on it I can, including getting involved with bits of the annual to keep costs down.
I still think that over 6 years and 50 to 70 hrs a year it has cost in order of 4x the cost of renting a similar-ish type.
However, I’m busy, subject to last minute changes or cancellations, and lazy about driving upto an hour to get to a suitable aircraft.
It is what it is, but cheaper? Oh no.
Peter wrote:
Can someone publish typical Accounts for a French or Swedish aeroclub?
I’ve found a couple of AGM reports in my emails which might help
I might have hard copies of the actual accounts from further back, but would have to go find them.
Whilst the club has use of the airfield and buildings free of charge, they’re unofficially responsible for the airfield and have to pay for the upkeep of the club house, weather station, hangar, etc. There’s various subsidies, and many people give their time for free. A lot of this is difficult to quantify let alone account for.
For a long time the club had cash reserves of €150k+, as this was cheaper in the long run than hull insurance. This was spent maybe 10 years ago on a new plane, and I don’t know how far the reserves have built up since. There is a definite long term approach, looking years or decades into the future; for example the club managed to lobby for and organise the tarmacking of the runway back in the 1960s or 70s.
On GA decline I would list:
I’ve already posted my opinions on the French aeroclub system, but as an owner I wouldn’t go back to abiding by someone else’s priorities and rules.
From personal experiences, renting in clubs does not work well for ‘long trips’, there are so many factors that would make the ‘user experience’ very sour:
- Telling FE who booked an aircraft for PPL test Monday in Lognes that you have left aircraft in Melun on Sunday night because you had too much fun
- Telling OPS you are changing aircraft registration as aircraft you are supposed to fly is not available and you have to re-submit
- Settling 4kE after 1kNM trip while getting swamped info fuel receipts scan for 3 weeks to get refunds
- The trip get cancelled on your behalf (12ks crosswind in TAF is enough not even METAR)
Club touring experience is more enjoyable when you are talking about ‘2 weeks Ralley’ or ‘visiting Airshow’ with other aircrafts
Anyone flying alone, friends or family…will need to get into renting from owners, shares or sole ownership
What @gallois described is also very close to how most German clubs operate.
Legally, most German clubs are an “eingetragener Verein” (e.V., “registered club”), which is a special legal entity under German law that is widely tax-exempt but may not generate a (significant) profit and may never use the clubs income for the benefit of individual members, no matter their position in the club.
Of course, there is a lot of cross-subsidising going on, with the more active members being somewhat subsidised by those who rarely fly, as everyone pays the same annual fees (except members declared as “Fördermitglied” who merely support the cause of the club financially). This is more pronounced in some clubs than others, the higher the yearly fees the more this effect comes into play, while others have low yearly fees and high hourly rates. Of course the latter increases marginal costs and thus disincentivises higher activity.
Notwithstanding gigabytes of forum posts on “owning v. renting”, almost nobody actually makes that calculation with a straight face – because the benefits of ownership are so massive. Many previous threads…
The same can be said about building your plane vs purchasing a plane. Yet some people then heads into the “value of your spare time”.
It’s the basic fact of life in general IMO. It’s all the bits and pieces you do in life that is your life. The end goal is death, and that has nothing to do with life at all. The journey is what it’s all about, and only one person can judge if that journey has been a cool one 
Clearly, if you want to use as much time flying as possible with the least amount of effort, the next best thing is to rent. The best thing is to become a professional pilot. Everything else are just variations of what you personally like to do and get involved with.
Money vise, owning has to be cheaper than renting, if you fly more than a certain hours per year. But then you also use lots of time on non flying activities, just to have the airplane ready for flying. The main thing is perhaps when you own a plane, you have a much higher incentive to fly more, partly because each extra hour will cost less than the previous, but mostly because it was the main reason you got the airplane in the first place. All the other stuff are also fun/interesting parts of the journey.
Yet some people then heads into the “value of your spare time”.
You of course mean me, but the context was different: justification of homebuilding as “saving you money”.
For a given level of equipment etc, homebuilding is merely transferring costs from the factory (materials, direct labour, profit) to the owner (unpaid hours in the shed) For many, that’s a great deal. But one needs to be aware that this is the deal. You aren’t magically getting something for nothing. And if you can’t find those hours, you need to wangle someone else to do it for you, or even buy a ready built homebuilt.
There will be additional downstream costs, when your wife runs off with the milkman – a 1970s English society caricature; we don’t have milkmen anymore because people buy milk in Waitrose (if aspiring rich) or Lidl (if pretend-poor), and have it delivered by Ocado (if actually rich) – and divorces you
From his smile you can assume he enjoys the job 
But it’s not all bad news. Maybe you didn’t like your wife much anyway (otherwise, why spend 5000hrs in a shed?). Also you can offset from the divorce cost the savings in maintenance of an Annex 1 plane.
I very much agree with Peter regarding homebuilt aircraft. You don’t get anything for free, instead you pay with your own lifetime. If you value that at zero, you can save significant amounts of money by building your own aircraft, otherwise the calculation might look different.
E.g. calculate each hour spent with the same rate as you get paid for your main job. In my case that’s about 40€/hr (on a side note, doctors really don’t get paid lots per hour, do they? Not in Europe…) and multiplying that with Peter’s figure of 5000 hrs, you end up with 200.000€ in my example.
As someone who is “time-poor”, that looks like a really bad deal to me. Of course, it doesn’t factor in the enjoyment one can get from that activity, which may be significant for some (so it’s basically their “quality time”) and inexistant for others.
As far as the original topic is concerned, I don’t think homebuilding has much influence on overall GA activity.
This comparison of cost to build an aircraft yourself or have it build by some else in a factory is not correct, in my opinion. As a person who builds his own aircraft, the build hours should be calculated at the net income per hour you get paid for your day job. On the other hand if you have it build in a factory and then get the invoice, you get charged the labour cost, that includes all taxes, pension and (health-)insurance. In western Europe roughly at least 2,5 times the net income.
So, to have some factory worker build your airplane for the same cost as you would get paid when working the hours it would cost you the build it, the factory would have to do in roughly 40% of the time (given you earn the same as the factory worker per hour).
