Actually, contrary to you, Peter, Bosco, I posted all the details.
Now you, ok? ;-)
I agree that it can be useful to calculate the total hourly cost and include the fixed costs but as stated, those are incurred anyway.
As the hull value increases, then a lot of the costs are small compared to depreciation, especially if you are buying an aircraft that is less than 3 years old. If buying new then depreciation is likely to be the biggest “cost” by far.
Yes, flying is definitely a luxury and if like me you fly about 100 hours a year, it clearly does not make sense to own 100% of an airplane.
Having a partner cuts all your costs in half and if they are the “right” kind of partner it can be a huge benefit when it comes to a number of things like:
Flying together to keep current
Ferrying for maintanence (especially if you are both busy)
learning from each other
There is no question that fractional ownership is a no brainer for an expensive and under utilised asset like a plane and a boat and the market is certainly shifting in this direction. Yes you dont have 100% availability but I have found that it is about 95% if you have good partners.
achimha wrote:
Should I calculate my pool costs in Euros per hour of swimming?
You can do that before acquisition. I’m with you on this. When I want to utilize an asset above what is planned, I count the additional costs. I don’t do it to make it appear cheaper. I already considered and accepted cost for the planned utilization. I don’t have to account for it again, I’ll pay that money either way. If that additional use is cheap, then the asset is clearly underutilized.
Martin wrote:
If that additional use is cheap, then the asset is clearly underutilized.
Aren’t 99% of our assets underutlized? Isn’t this what all the “share economy” is about? Wouldn’t our economy collapse if people only acquired what they have a “full” use for? The car industry is very scared of the new share economy mobility concepts.
I own a hedge trimmer, use it twice a year. My neighbor has one, too and uses it twice a year. If done smartly, the whole street could do just fine with a single hedge trimmer. It would be very bad for Bosch and the like though…
But OTOH you are a fan of modern lifestyles, right? So am I.
The solution is to have no hedge, like me :-)
I for example find it silly that there’s 6 electric aircraft tugs of the SAME type in my hangar. We could have bought 1 and an additional battery. But when I once made that proposal people looked at me as if i had just arrived from Mars ;-)
Yes the hedge trimmer analogy is accurate but the saved capital by splitting ownership does not compensate you for the hassle factor.
However when the asset has a very high value like a plane or boat or exotic car, then it really makes sense to share ownership, especially if there is a large amount of depreciation to consider.
No doubt that the sharing economy is taking off and more people and companies are embracing this.
Syndicates can have huge problems in reality. I would not like to put a % on how many work without major in-fighting (because a lot of people will say they are in a really great one 
) but I am sure it’s less than 10%. I base this on face to face private conversations with pilots I know and believe. This kind of stuff will never be posted on a forum and probably not in an email either.
So many people are willing to pay a heavy price for total control.
Sharing the electric tug is however a no-brainer, and my explanation for that is “welcome to the dog-eat-dog situation in some quarters of human interaction, not just GA”
But it’s possibly not black and white, if somebody likes to have a permanently attached tug on their plane. I have had damage (could easily cost four figures plus if it was worse) to the nose gear, as a result of careless attachment of a tug. Some people think it’s fine to sling a steel hook around the shiny piece of the nose gear, but any dents in that will bugger up the nose gear oil seal and the whole thing has to be rebuilt. But you could deal with this by a rule saying that nobody may tow somebody else’s plane.
achimha wrote:
Aren’t 99% of our assets underutlized?
I wouldn’t want to guess a number but I never claimed the opposite. However, the possibility exists. And, actually, good (not necessarily optimal) utilization of a plane by a private pilot is quite achievable (not any plane, understandably). I don’t think I have to write here how one goes about calculating these things.
As for trimming hedges, I just hire a gardener. It should be possible to rent such tools. I’m not saying we shouldn’t buy things we can’t “fully” use, but I do consider utility when I’m buying something. And then accept the price if I want to have my own (because it’s more convenient or whatever the reason and sharing might not be an option).
I’m fully in favor of the “share economy”… and in fact embrace it by having two planes share me.
At which point do spouses become an object of the “share economy”? The Romans would say “variatio delectat”.
Collecting, owning and amassing objects is human nature. Can’t talk my 3 year old daughter out of reducing her ever growing 200 item collection of “pretty pebble stones”.
