Why is there no entrepreneurial mojo when it comes to owner flown in Europe?

AdamFrisch wrote:

As a owner operated VLJ pilot, even if you only fly 100hrs year, you probably fly as much as most pro pilots do on the same type.

You won’t find many professional pilots who only fly 100 hours per year. No way to make a living from that. And if he flies different types for the rest of the year he will still be much more current than the 100hr/year owner-pilot.

I have flown with very bad (experienced!) professional pilots and I have flown and trained with very talented private pilots. But this is not the norm unfortunately. Usually it is the other way round. And therefore the general advice to anyone who thinks about buying himself a jet or other fast and complex type must be to get an experienced pilot for that plane as well. At least initially.

AdamFrisch wrote:

You go to same FlightSafety recurring, you have the same licenses – what’s the difference?

The main difference is “supervision”. Unless you fly as private pilot for a private owner (yes, you can actually do that straight after flying school if your training provider and the insurer agree) you will get trained on the job for quite some time. Commercial operators of jets (in Europe for any size and both category 23 and 25) need two pilots to fly them. The newly licensed first officer will need to fly under supervision by a qualified captain for a certain number of hours and/or sectors. Thereafter he will fly in the right hand seat for as long as it takes to unfreeze his ATPL (min. 1500 hours) and find himself a position in the left hand seat. Takes five to ten years typically. Then he needs to be trained and checked out in the left hand seat. After that he must fly a certain number of hours/sectors for command supervision, again with an experienced training captain, but this time in the left hand seat. In “my” company, one out of maybe five first officers does not complete this stage first time and will have do do another year or two in the right hand seat for more proficiency.
Now please don’t tell me that this is not different from that owner-buyer-pilot who upgrades himself from Piper Malibu to VLJ!

I tend to agree with what_next regarding averages. I think an owner pilot can be as “professional” and safe but there are not the checks and balances you get in an AOC operation. I do however think that the type-rating system is a significant hurdle that more casual pilots won’t be bothered with.

Owner flown bizjets have a much better safety record that owner flown piston and turboprops.

AdamFrisch wrote:

It’s probably around 200-400hrs/year which makes the difference between a charter pilot and a busy owner operator negligible.

A full-time employed bizjet pilot in central Europe flies anything between 400 and 800 hours a year. Myself I am on a part time contract and still do over 300. And fly on SEPs and MEPs beside that. That is not a negligible difference I would say. Especially considering that the thread starter on PPRuNe has a very specific mission profile which means that he will do one longer flight maybe every two or three weeks. Two weeks between flights in a complex and fast machine. How can that be safe? How often will he do a short field landing, how often an instrument approach into real weather, how often will he hand-fly an instrument approach? The typical commercial bizjet pilot – even part time like myself – flies on 3 or 4 days per week. Never more than 3 days between flights. That is a huge difference.

JasonC wrote:

Owner flown bizjets have a much better safety record that owner flown piston and turboprops.

Yes, mainly because the insurers insist on proper training and some degree of supervision. They have a lot to lose. Still the commercially flown bizjets have a better safety record than owner flown ones, at least around here.

I think there is a lot of elitism here.

I don’t get this argument about 100-200hrs/year (=unsafe) an 400-800hrs/year (=safe). There is a vastly bigger range of pilot ability, comprehension of aircraft systems, etc. Pilots range from just about hanging in there (but probably OK in the RHS), through “bright but cannot fly a plane” (OK for flying on days of their choice), all the way to really clever ones who can also fly well (probably rather rare, based on stories I hear from the bizjet scene).

There is also risk compensation. A pilot in a passenger carrying firm will be fired if he refuses to fly in any wx above ops minima. But someone flying for their own personal travel doesn’t have to depart in OVC001 +TSRA etc. Even in my TB20 I get a ~95-98% despatch rate on a trip to say Greece if I allocate three consecutive days to get away. 90% of the time I get away on the first of those days. And a jet has a despatch rate of some 99% (due to de-ice, radar, rate of climb and operating ceiling) and that will be true even with a complete muppet at the controls so long as he knows how to use the radar. A muppet who can’t use the radar (and needs to aim for a blue patch, after departure) will have a despatch rate of say 95%. However I think anybody who can work a Collins ProLine probably knows how to work the radar Risk compensation is a massive safety factor in private flying, which is the subject here.

Even with “business travel”, a good % of what private pilots call “I fly on business” is in reality flying to meet up with tame parties i.e. meeting suppliers, attending exhibitions, meeting up with chums who distribute their product, etc. If the wx is bad you just cancel, or jump on an airliner. Very few are doing formal customer visits where not turning up is simply not an option. And, In Europe, with many customers you need to conceal your mode of travel (a plane of any sort) which in turn means that even more of the business contacts you fly to will be “understanding” people. This is a world away from being a pilot employed by an AOC operation to fly clients at a short notice, anywhere, in almost any wx, with no delay. If you have the option of delaying a few hours, the wx picture is usually vastly different.

Also I don’t see how a £3000/hr budget is not enough for a used jet bought for £2M, which isn’t going to be some complete wreck. For example I am damn sure nobody flying 100-200hrs/year in a privately owned Mustang on a maintenance programme is paying 300k/year. Maybe JasonC has some figures?

I’ve asked some people in the business and will come back with what I find.

Peter wrote:

I don’t get this argument about 100-200hrs/year (=unsafe) an 400-800hrs/year (=safe).

I don’t think anybody called one thing safe and the other unsafe. But I think anyone agrees that more hours (or better: more sectors!) is safer than less hours. And anyone who has ever operated complex and time-critical machinery will certainly agree that long pauses (and everything over a week is a long pause when it comes to flying a jet) are counter-productive.

Peter wrote:

There is also risk compensation. A pilot in a passenger carrying firm will be fired if he refuses to fly in any wx above ops minima. But someone flying for their own personal travel doesn’t have to depart in OVC001 +TSRA etc.

In theory yes. But when I look at the accidents I see quite a few owner-operators who press on into less than minimal weather and similar. The commercial pilot on the other hand is not allowed to even try an approach below certain minima.

Peter wrote:

A muppet who can’t use the radar (and needs to aim for a blue patch, after departure) will have a despatch rate of say 95%.

I am one of those muppets who waits for a clear patch before departing with thunderstorms in the vicinity. Has happened twice during the last month and on one occasion I even shut down the engines again which were already running because the thunderstorm came upon us a lot quicker than anticipated. Nobody fired me because of that…

Peter wrote:

Also I don’t see how a £3000/hr budget is not enough for a used jet bought for £2M, which isn’t going to be some complete wreck.

Try it for yourself if you don’t believe people who have been there and done it. Anyway, as it turned out those 2M aircraft would not have been able to fulfill the mission profile this person had in mind and he would have had to look one category up (from very light jet to light jet) in order to be able to do his flights.

Whatever comes out of it, those two threads – the one on proon and the one here – have shown me that from now on I will just plain shut up when my work becomes a matter of discussion and keep my advice for those who pay me for it (like – luckily! – my employer). To everyone his own.

Flying a business jet safely is not about the flying part, and of course not about the avionics. It’s about learning the SYSTEMS and developing procedures to a professional standard. And I doubt very much that a 100 h/year private pilot can get good enough.

I know this: I have (myself and in real life) flown an A320 and an ATR42. Both from the right seat and under the supervision of a test pilot. I can tell you that flying these planes is very simple. Flying the A320 by hand is simpler than my Cirrus. And even my first (and only) landings in both planes were good ebough after I had a 3 hour checkout in the simulator. When I once (before the above experience) asked my friend Frank S., a retired 767 captain, if “i could fly the 767” he only said “you can if you can fly a 172”.

BUT, and that’s what counts: You would not want to be my passenger (not even in a Seneca) in an emergency situation. And that’s what you have to train for. And from what I have seen (and i have seen a lot of that stuff) a typical “private pilot” simply does not have the time and(or money to become professional.

But I think what_next and Jason know more about this, and i trust their experience. Flying a bizjet is NOT to be compared with an SEP.

I was commenting on the private flying scenario e.g. what I would do if I was flying a jet. ~2400hrs of private flying should be enough to have an idea of how it works.

The thing about busting minima is that it is optional. The pilot is not forced to do it. Just because some do it doesn’t make flying unsafe. Those who crashed at Egelsbach, Samedan, Trier, etc, had their paying client breathing down their neck, metaphorically or literally.

I would not claim my full motion sim time with a TRE is worth anything of relevance. 2hrs in a CJ3, 1.5hrs in a B737, both dead easy to fly including the ILS. Irrelevant however. Especially as the 737 is not SP

Just got this:

Hence I would not shoot down somebody asking about it.

Can I make a different point?

Someone comes to me and asks which motorcycle to buy.

I might mention once – “you know riding these things is a lot less safe than driving a car, right?”

But if I kept going on about it, instead of sharing my vast knowledge about motorcycles, I would be considered – to put it mildly – impolite and unhelpful.

[I actually don’t know anything about motorcycles…. so don’t ask.]

Peter wrote:

It costs about £1,600 per hour to fly a CJ4 (excl capital costs).
That’s based on 200 hours per year – plus it’s a new aeroplane.

My very last post on this subject – anywhere! – promise!

In the original thread we were talking about 100 hours. This doubles the cost per hour for all the fixed stuff: hangar, insurance, CAMO, database updates, all mandatory maintenance events not covered by the maintenance contact, cleaning, toilet service (you need that on every flight the thing gets used otherwise you will instantly faint when you stick your head into the cabin after tha plane has been parked in Spain for a week), crew training (10k per year is what they charge you for one pilot minimum) etc.

My quick and dirty calculation for an owner flown 2M jet regarding annual cost with 100 hours flown would be:
- 100k depreciation (approx. bluebook figure)
- 100k maintenance contract cost (1k per hour)
- 100k running cost (fuel, airway, landing, handling)
+ xk for all the rest which I have listed above. Another 100k maybe
- capital cost? I would say yes, Adam would say no – anyway, we are above 300k already so what does it matter.
- crew cost? I would strongly urge any private pilot to get some coaching during the first year by an experienced pilot. Including travel expenses this will again cost something like 50k for the number of trips the guy has in mind. One can certainly get it cheaper than that but then one could probably do without.

Telling anyone that he can get it for less than that would be a lie that I wouldn’t want to live with. Therefore I don’t.