As someone who now owns an aircraft, a yacht in Greece, a 5.5l V8 motor car ( UK subscribers will know the complete folly of this! ) and a very nice over and under clay shooting shotgun I can relate very strongly to the ‘man maths’ put forward by Howard.
But then aart put it succinctly, there are benefits to ownership that can’t be calculated. Spending an afternoon sitting in a Greek bay looking out over the water, or a couple of hours washing and polishing the car or an afternoon chatting with mates and smashing clays or seeing the rich tapestry of the UK below your own wings ……… all priceless!
To paraphrase an internet meme ‘My biggest worry is that when I die my wife will sell all my toys for the prices I told her I bought them for’. On the other hand ‘you can’t take it with you and you’re a long time dead’
( PS: Wednesday she and I will have been together for 34 years and she still puts up with my hobbies. I’m a lucky, lucky bloke! )
Howard wrote:
I do wonder how much “man maths” is involved in peoples’ plane cost calculations. Speaking for myself, a little while ago I made the mistake of working out how much my plane has cost me in the previous twelve months and the answer was a cool 80% more than I had originally budgeted. The cost per hour is ridiculous…but my plane is my only extravagance (if I disregard the others of course
Spot on….I have never bothered adding it up….we’re in this earth a short time and to not fly is a travesty…
Wednesday she and I will have been together for 34 years and she still puts up with my hobbies. I’m a lucky, lucky bloke!
Congratulations! I have named our home wifi after the date we met, 15SEP2003, just to make sure I don’t forget it 
Peter wrote:
Congratulations! I have named our home wifi after the date we met, 15SEP2003, just to make sure I don’t forget it
Is that Justine or N113AC?? 
The former. The plane came on the scene more than a year earlier.
Peter wrote:
Congratulations! I have named our home wifi after the date we met, 15SEP2003, just to make sure I don’t forget it
:) :) excellent!
Nimbusgb wrote:
there are benefits to ownership that can’t be calculated. Spending an afternoon sitting in a Greek bay looking out over the water, or a couple of hours washing and polishing the car or an afternoon chatting with mates and smashing clays or seeing the rich tapestry of the UK below your own wings ……… all priceless!
Those are the benefits of being alive, which I’ve found personally are very much aligned with the benefits of owning stuff. For me, the two go hand in hand. I’ve never rented a plane unless it was for a specific training activity, all of my hours otherwise have been in a plane I owned (or many years ago that my father owned). I think that’s why the cost per hour comparison to aircraft rental is hollow to me – renting somebody else’s plane just to get up in the air is not something I’d do, any more than I’d rent a car just to keep my driver’s license current. If I didn’t own the plane I’d be off doing something else.
The best way to kill GA is to make it so difficult and costly to own a plane that most people choose to go off and do something else with something they can own. There are a lot of other opportunities to own and enjoy things and I think on the average people will take them over spending any significant amount of income renting a plane by the hour.
Peter wrote:
Wednesday she and I will have been together for 34 years and she still puts up with my hobbies. I’m a lucky, lucky bloke!Congratulations! I have named our home wifi after the date we met, 15SEP2003, just to make sure I don’t forget it
Very conveniently my first solo was exactly two years after our wedding.
I guess the idea of calculating hour costs based on 100 hours per year came out of the attempt to create one simple measure to compare airplanes. Its a bit like GPH or miles per gallon. If you want to explain to a new buyer the differences in cost between several types, it is important that it´s being done by a common standard. I found the hour cost/100 hrs/year base useful in the past, but I also have to say, there are other ways of comparing. I did like the 100 hour suggestion for another reason: For a new owner it is an incentive to reach this imaginary goal and the fact that the hour cost goes down the more he flies helps as well.
The only right way looking at it is sweeping the costs under the carpet and not thinking about it.
