Land and Hold Short

I’m flying to Boston on Sunday for the week to chair the XML 2006 conference. When I fly to New York City, I usually land at Teterboro Airport and park at Atlantic Aviation — the gas is expensive, but my Cherokee doesn’t use much, and since U.S. customs is located right at Atlantic I can fly non-stop from Ottawa, shaving 45 minutes from the trip.

I thought about trying the same thing with Boston this time by flying into Laurence G Hanscom Field Airport (aka Bedford), just west of the city. The Signature FBO is typical for a big city — expensive gas, $25 handling fee waived if you buy a minimum amount of fuel — so that’s not a problem. MassPort, who runs the major Boston airports, also tacks on a $10 landing fee and $12.75/night parking charge, but again, that’s not too bad.

After that, it starts to get strange. For example, some busy airports offer reduced landing fees at night where there’s not much traffic, but MassPort goes the other way: there’s a $49 surcharge for each landing between 11pm and 7am, and it doubles to $98 if you do it more than 5 times in a year. I guess that’s for noise abatement. MassPort also requires a prop lock on all parked planes, and there used to be a $10/day rental fee for them, but Signature now loans them out for free. Finally, the kicker is a $65 user fee for the privilege of clearing customs at KBED in a four-seat plane.

So much for that. I’ll add 45 minutes to my trip, clear customs for free (in Massena, NY or Burlington, VT), then land at one of the airports just outside MassPort’s ring of control and ride the commuter train in, as I’ve done three times in the past. Check out the MassPort fee page to see how easily bad government can take the fun out of flying — it makes the forthcoming Nav Canada big-airport user fees look tame in comparison.

December is insurance-renewal time for me. Fortunately, this year it’s reasonably good news.

How airplane insurance works

There are two main components to aircraft insurance:

1. liability insurance, which covers claims from people other than you (such as passengers and people on the ground); and
2. hull insurance, which protects the value of your plane (some combination of in the air, on the ground in motion, on the ground not in motion, or usually all three).

Liability insurance for a private plane tends to be fixed at around $500-700/year for $1,000,000 coverage, as far as I can tell. It’s not too much, because (accident stories aside), pilots rarely hurt passengers or people on the ground. Liability insurance is required in Canada, even for visiting planes from the U.S.

Hull insurance is a percentage of the value of your plane, I think typically 1.5-3%/year, depending on the type of plane, your experience, etc., and is entirely optional — if replacing your plane wouldn’t be an extraordinarily large expense for you, then financially, you’re better off without the insurance (as with anything). Most of the claims don’t have to do with dramatic crashes but with taxiing collisions, wind/storm damage while tied down, wheel-up landings (for retracts), ground loops and wing damage (for tail draggers), etc. Planes are unbelievably expensive to fix, and what looks like a couple of tiny dents can sometimes result in a complete write-off.

Comparing costs

When comparing the cost of insuring different planes, it’s important to take hull value into account. For example, if the hull insurance costs 2% of the hull value, then you’ll pay $1,200 hull on a plane with a declared value of $60,000, but $8,000 hull on a plane with a declared value of $400,000. That, and not their safety record, is the main reason that new planes like the Cirrus are so expensive to insure: it costs a lot more to replace a more expensive plane (duh).

The failing U.S. economy and the aircraft owner

Although most Americans don’t realize it, their money has lost a huge chunk of its value over the past few years (about 30% against the Canadian dollar, and much more against the Pound and Euro), so everything priced in American dollars (including their houses, planes, boats, cars, and shares) is worth less than it used to be: a U.S. stock that was worth USD 100/share five years ago has to be priced at about USD 125/share now just to break even in Canadian terms (more in Europe), and that’s still providing $0 capital gain. Used planes are priced primarily in US dollars, so their real value has been tumbling in recent years, even if the US sticker price looks about the same. As a result, we Canadian airplane owners are taking a bath — the only good news is that since our planes are worth so much less, they’re cheaper to insure (it’s also cheap to buy up, if you’re so inclined).

This year’s damage

My insurance cost has been declining gradually since I bought the plane due to my increasing experience and ratings, but the fall in the U.S. dollar (and subsequent drop in my plane’s resale value) has accelerated things. This year, I’ll be paying only CAD 1,520 to insure my Warrior for hull and liability, down from about CAD 2,300 when I bought the plane in 2002 — the drop in the plane’s value due to the low U.S. dollar accounts for $200-300 of that, and some of the rest might come from my having passed the magic 500 hour mark last year. Now I have to keep my fingers crossed for a cheap annual inspection as well.

[Update 2006-11-20: it looks like they've pulled even the small amount of Canadian data that they can get from the FAA database — there's nothing but US airports and navaids in there now.]

Well, the DAFIF — the free database of worldwide aeronautical information that used to be available free from the U.S. Department of Defense — has been gone for a few weeks, and it’s having repercussions that I hadn’t anticipated. It turns out that the most popular flight planning web site, Aeroplanner, was using the DAFIF for their non-U.S. data, so Canada has suddenly gone blank: aside from a few major airports and navaids that happen to be in the FAA database, and the segments of a few airways crossing the border, the airways, intersections, navaids, airports, terminal airspace, control zones, restricted airspace, and everything else that used to crowed their online maps is gone, leaving the site useless for anyone (Canadian or American) planning a flight that doesn’t stay entirely within U.S. airspace. The company graciously offered me a pro-rated refund for my subscription, though I decided not to take them up on it.

Lots of other people use the DAFIF for cheap or free flight planning, for controlling aircraft in flight simulators, and much more. In many cases, they can keep using the last public edition, which will slowly get more and more out of date, but that obviously wouldn’t be a responsible choice for a real-world online flight planning service like Aeroplanner.

Who’s the real villain?

So who should we be mad at? The U.S. DoD is an obvious target, since they’re the ones who pulled the data from public use, but let’s step back and think for a second:

1. In the U.S., the FAA still publishes a free database for American airspace, with a bit of Mexican and Canadian thrown in.
2. Almost every other country in the world refuses to release its air navigation data free to the public, period.
3. The U.S. military used to make up for that by publishing a lot of every other country’s airnav data as well.

No more charity

Sure, I wish they still published the DAFIF (and I suspect their reasons for stopping are silly), but the real villains here are the Canadian government, the British government, the Australian government, and every other government that refuses to release free information to their own citizens about their own airspace. We were lucky that the U.S. DoD was willing to help cover that disgraceful gap for so many years, and that they have given us a good starting point for a free,collaborative airnav database (we still have the last DAFIF edition to start from), but our years of living off American charity have now ended.

A new start?

Speaking of free, collaborative databases, Paul Tomblin has set up a wiki to start discussing life after DAFIF. Why not swing by and take a look. And don’t be surprised if, in the meantime, your favorite flight planning tool suddenly turns Canada into the huge, empty white space that the rest of the world always imagined it was.