Columnist and pilot Mark R. Twombly is a partner in the ownership of a Piper Twin Comanche.
The two questions most often asked of airplane owners have to do with top-of-the-green extremes: How fast does it go, and how much does it cost? In each case, we tend to exaggerate the answer, lowballing one and gilding the other. You can probably guess which is which.
The cost of airplane ownership is one of the great secrets in aviation. Budgeting anticipated costs is difficult because of all the variables involved — how much and how the airplane is flown, how it is maintained, the frequency and extent of unscheduled repairs, the price of fuel and oil, the extent of modifications and upgrades, surprises in the form of service bulletins and airworthiness directives...the list goes on. A new owner soon learns that the only cost that can be pinpointed with accuracy is the purchase price. Pretty much everything that follows is a guesstimate.
An owner can't say for certain how much it will cost to operate the airplane over the next 12 months, but surely we know what we spent last year, and the year before that, right? Well, maybe, but no one really wants to go public with how much they lavish on their airplane. Sometimes it's better not to know the actual cost of ownership in excruciating detail. Ignorance of the exact proportions of the cash outflow isn't exactly bliss, but for a variety of reasons — mental health and marital peace come to mind — it may be better than having intimate knowledge of big numbers.
Ignorance was the path my partner, Doug, and I initially chose. Our rationale was simple: If we knew how much it truly cost every time we fired up the engines for an hour of poking holes in the sky, we'd probably quit making so many holes. Call it "ostrich accounting," but our head-in-the-sand approach worked for us. We flew, we paid, we flew some more.
Ostrich accounting worked fine until a couple of developments. First, we launched what has turned out to be a sustained program of major modifications and upgrades. As the bills began to get more serious and more frequent, we began to feel the need for more formal accounting. The second event was directly related to the first. Costs were on the rise, which tended to force our respective bank accounts in the other direction. We decided we needed a third partner, a person who could get along with the two of us, who enjoyed flying a light twin, and, not insignificantly, who would not shy from writing checks.
We found him in Rick. Now we were three, and no question about it, the Cliffs Notes that passed for our financial books would no longer be acceptable.
Doug throttled up his copy of Intuit Quicken and began recording the specific comings and goings of each airplane-related dollar and cent. And to no one's great surprise, there were a lot of entries on the expense side of the ledger that required an equal and opposite reaction on the income side.
In the three and a half years covered by the reports, we've spent about $100,000 on the airplane, not including acquisition cost or fuel. Of that, about 45 percent has been for major modifications, upgrades, and refurbishing — a new interior, new paint, rebuilding the right engine, new avionics, and airframe mods (performance fairings and engine cowls).
Backing out the big capital expenses leaves about $55,000 spent on "normal" operating costs — annual inspections, unscheduled maintenance and repairs, hangar fees, insurance, charts and electronic navigation databases, and supplies.
Maintenance is the single most expensive line item, thanks to a couple of expensive annual inspections. Unscheduled maintenance, though annoyingly frequent, has not been a significant percentage of the normal operating costs.
The year we did the least amount of flying — 2001 — turned out to be the most expensive. The airplane was in the shop for about half the year for the engine overhaul, then straight to a long annual inspection, and then to the paint shop. It was finally ready to fly in mid-September, precisely when the National Airspace System was shut down.
Charting, a combination of paper and electronic, has remained relatively constant at less than $1,000 a year, while insurance has doubled to more than $4,000. It's ironic that something we can't do without on almost every flight — navigation information — cost a fraction of something we've never taken advantage of and never plan to — insurance.
We could cut our bottom-line costs nearly in half by eliminating modifications and upgrades, but we've already started to upgrade some of the original upgrades. This year, for example, we replaced a first-generation IFR approach-approved GPS with a contemporary model with a color screen and Nexrad weather mapping capability. We're also replacing the generators with alternators and installing new electronic tachometers. The mods and upgrades line item will be fat again in 2003.
The detailed financial reports have made us realize that the hourly flight-time charge we instituted when Rick joined the team (to cover operating costs minus fuel, and feed an engine overhaul reserve) should be bumped up by about 250 percent if we want to keep Doug's accounting software happy. That's sobering.
OK, so now we know the airplane is costing us more than we thought. We can still lie about how fast we're flying.
