Land and Hold Short

Here’s what it cost to own and operate a 1979 Piper Warrior II in Ottawa, Canada in 2007 with 80 hours air time (a bit more flight time, of course). Since the US and Canadian dollars are basically at par now, there’s no need to convert:

These are real costs, including sales taxes, not the BS costs you hear people throwing around at the airport. Reserves are $20/hour for engine and paint. I also pay about $500/year for charts and recurrent training, but I’d pay the same as a renter, so I don’t count those as ownership costs.

2007 was by far the cheapest year I’ve had with C-FBJO, and also the fewest hours I’ve flown (I’m usually over 100). I was parked at a less expensive airport and used less gas (flying less), but the biggest difference was maintenance — annual maintenance for a small plane like mine can be $2,000 one year and $10,000 the next, depending on what goes wrong (and even the simplest plane has a lot that can go wrong). I’m keeping a nearly 30-year-old plane operating, so stuff wears out and has to be replaced all the time, just as it would with a 30-year-old car; unlike with cars, however, buying a new plane isn’t a solution — I read recently that routine inspection and maintenance for an SR-22 runs $8,000-$10,000, and that’s without any problems coming up.

Fees include tie-down (and required club membership) at my home airport, transient landing and parking fees during trips, and the compulsory $75/year Nav Canada and $27.50 US customs fees. Consumables are oil (mainly), filters, fluids, etc.

When so many of the costs — tie-down fees, insurance, and (most) maintenance — are fixed, I can see the logic in taking one or two partners. You’ll still pay just as much for fuel and engine/paint reserve, but you slash the other overheads. I don’t think I’ll take a partner in C-FBJO at this point, but if I move up to something bigger like a Cherokee Six, I probably won’t try it alone.

So where did this money take me and my passengers (besides the Ottawa area) in 2007? In chronological order, Maniwaki QC, New York City (Teterboro), Drummondville QC, Pembroke ON, Toronto ON (Buttonville), Sault Ste. Marie ON, Toronto ON (City Centre), Brockville ON, Waterloo ON, Toronto ON (Buttonville) again, Sundridge ON, Sault Ste. Marie ON again, Toronto ON (City Centre) again, Burlington VT, Boston MA (Norwood), Alexandria Bay NY (Maxson), New Jersey and New York City (Caldwell), Montreal QC (Trudeau), Baie Comeau QC, Maniwaki QC again, and Burlington VT again. Not all that exciting a year, but it kept the rust off the wings (mine and the plane’s).

A bunch of us agreed to post on the same topic yesterday, writing about one good part of flying, one bad part, and one weird part (unfortunately, I’m running a day late). Here are some of the other blogs with a post:

• Off the beaten path
• Nec temere nec timide (I also have a blog with a Latin name, Quoderat — so there!)
• pilot in training
• Sulako’s blog

Recently, in the cold weather, my Warrior’s battery has barely managed one try starting the plane — any more, and it goes flat. Most recently, it happened after I’d just been flying 1.7 hours and tried to restart after a short fuel stop. I had to figure out whether the problem was the battery or the alternator (or regulator).

Over the past couple of months, I had two exceptionally good experiences with aviation-related businesses, and one exceptionally bad one. As a service to my fellow owners, I’m going to name them all here.

Cheer: Great Lakes Aero

This company makes windows for light, unpressurized aircraft that are roughly triple the quality of the original manufacturers’ at a third the price. As if that weren’t enough, I bought a new windshield in May but didn’t get around to having it installed until December, when I found out that I’d bought the wrong thickness. No problem: Great Lakes was happy to take it back and give me a refund (minus a trivial restocking fee) and ship me a new one.

Cheer: Sutton Aviation

This won’t be of much interest unless you keep your plane near Ottawa, but this year Sutton Aviation at Rockcliffe Airport showed me that an annual inspection (and associated upgrades, rectifications, and repairs) can be fast, thorough, and (relatively) inexpensive. Maybe I can afford to keep this plane after all.

Jeer: Aircraft Spruce

I was excited when I found out that Aircraft Spruce would be opening a Canadian operation, even if it’s just a transhipment point, because I’m tired of the cross-border mail order hassles. I called Aircraft Spruce first to confirm that their deal with UPS meant no brokerage fees (”just tax”, said the man on the phone), then discovered when my package arrived that Spruce had simply collected the infamous, non-refundable $60–70 brokerage fee on UPS’s behalf before shipping you the order — how is that a benefit to Canadian customers? They refused even to apologize afterwards, much less make good on their mistake (at first, they tried to claim that the fee was sales tax, until I pointed out the sales tax on a separate line). Until we have a real Canadian source, other mail order companies like Chief Aircraft will be happy for your business, and will treat you better in the bargain.

According to AOPA, the biggest issue facing general aviation in the U.S. is the risk of user fees. I agree with Phil Boyer that user fees could hurt GA, especially if they are per use (as in Australia) rather than flat fees (as in Canada, with one misguided exception); however, I think that there are even bigger issues facing North American general aviation. Here, on no scientific basis whatsoever, are my top five:

1. The end of AvGas: Almost nobody makes AvGas any more, it’s expensive to transport, and environmentalists rightly hate it because it’s leaded. Watch for it to get rarer and more expensive, with more and more shortages, over the next few years, at the same time as ethanol in MoGas renders it unsuitable for the few aircraft engines that could use it. The solution? Diesel engines, but they’re still expensive to install (nearly the whole cost of my plane), probably won’t ever be approved for all existing models, and do not yet have a significant North American maintenance network in place. Most old planes will have to be retired, and most pilots won’t be able to afford to replace ‘em, so they’ll retire with their planes.

2. (In)Security: It’s there, and it’s not going to go away. The general public has always been afraid of airplanes (I’ve posted in the past about how we exacerbate the problem by promoting air shows), and general aviation in particular scares them because it’s so lightly regulated. In the 2004 U.S. presidential election, one of the candidates was a GA pilot and went out of his way not to cause problems for his fellow pilots; in 2008, we probably won’t be that lucky. And the next time something bad happens, watch for GA to be the scapegoat even more than in 2001: we could be regulated right out of existence on either or both sides of the border.

3. Airport closures: New residential neighbourhoods, either on reclaimed industrial land in the city or former farmland in the country, almost always mean bad news for general aviation. Airports are useful only when they’re near somewhere you want to go, so the most useful airports are typically also the most threatened: Toronto City Centre Airport is constantly under seige from nearby condo dwellers, for example, and even little Rockcliffe Airport struggles with community noise complaints (note that both of these airports have been there since before World War II). Airports aren’t the only ones who suffer from the soccer-mom onslaught: in rural areas farmers have to deal with complaints from new subdivisions about noise and smell, hunters have to go further away to hunt, and so on.

4. Maintenance: Most of the GA fleet is, and will remain, old — very few of us can shell out $300K-$1M for a new light plane, so we have to settle for spending $20K-$150K on something older. It would take only a couple of expensive Airworthiness Directives from the FAA or Transport Canada to knock a huge part of the fleet out of the sky by requiring a repair worth more than the planes’ resale value. Furthermore, the shops that maintain these planes for us often operate on a shoestring, billing much less per hour than an auto shop, and in the U.S. a few of them are starting to refuse to work on older planes for liability reasons (U.S. law protects manufacturers from being sued once the planes are a certain age, so the shop would be the only one to go after in a crash).

5. User fees: We’ve been paying these in Canada for a while now, and since they’ve remained low and fixed (thanks to COPA), they don’t seem to have had any impact at all on GA. However, that could change easily. If either Canada or the U.S. introduced a pay-per-use system, flying could quickly become too expensive and/or too dangerous for most GA owners. For example, if you had to pay $100 each time you filed IFR, scud running might become a bit more tempting; if you had to pay $25 for a weather briefing, you’d be less likely to talk to a specialist about icing. Realistically, I don’t think this is as big a threat as the others, but I’m still grateful that COPA and AOPA (I’m a member of both) are looking out for our interests.

My plane’s back on the line today. After doing some high-speed taxi checks to make sure nothing was leaking or running too hot or cold, I had to try to push the plane back into its spot through snow and a small ditch, cover it up, and plug it in. Call me slow (seriously — go ahead), but it took me until my fourth winter owning a plane to figure out some very simple tricks for moving, covering, and plugging in a plane in a snowy, slippery, uneven parking spot.

It’s been four years, almost to the day, since I bought my 1979 Piper Warrior II, and it’s time for another annual inspection (I’ve moved it up from May to December to avoid missing good flying weather, so this is the second annual in 2006).

So far, everything looks good, but this is not going to be the stereotypical owner-pilot annual inspection progress posting. Instead, I wanted to mention that while people refer to the Cherokee as a relatively simple plane, this is the first year that it has actually seemed simple to me.

I was able to talk to my AME (mechanic) on his level instead of forcing him to stoop to mine, and I knew — not just academically, but from real experience and sense of touch — what nearly every exposed part was and how it was supposed to work. A couple of weeks ago, I prepared a short spreadsheet of the extra work I wanted done and my estimated hours for each item, and the AME agreed that my estimates were in the right ballpark. Today we walked through the inspection snag sheet quickly and efficiently. I approved a small amount of extra work based on the findings during the initial inspection, then drove my altimeter down to the instrument shop for its biennial recertification.

It really is a different experience when you understand what’s under the cowling and behind the interior panels. Early bush pilots had to take care of their own planes, but from what I understand, a modern commercial pilot flying (say) a Cessna 182 is not even allowed to change her own oil unless she also happens to be an AME. I’m not sure this is a good thing: maybe a month or two helping on a shop floor (fetching buckets of propwash or what-have-you) would be a good addition to the commercial pilot syllabus.

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: The ELT is back and recertified with a new battery, but the forecast tomorrow calls for cloud and ice from about hilltop level to 9,000 ft, so the Hope Air flight is canceled.

UNSAR is the Transport Canada acronym for an UnNecessary Search And Rescue alert. In addition to publicising the problem in a newsletter article, they have produced a poster that’s shown in most FBOs and flying clubs with rescue aircraft circling a delivery van, a (perfectly OK) float plane, etc., while in the bottom right panel a real crash goes unattended.

I was on my way home from a family breakfast Sunday morning when I noticed a message on my cell phone. The SAR centre picked up an ELT signal from the vicinity of Rockcliffe Airport, and after a line check, they determined that it was coming from my plane. I was out there within 45 minutes, and determined that

1. The signal was coming from my plane (strong enough that it spilled over onto other frequencies).
2. The cockpit ELT switch was set to “arm”, not “on”.
3. Turning the switch to “off” stopped the ELT for a minute or so, then it started again.

It would have been better, of course, if I’d been in the habit of turning the cockpit switch to “off” whenever I parked the plane, but in this case, it wouldn’t have helped — after a couple of weeks of constant rain, my guess is that some moisture got into the side panels and shorted the switch, since the ELT was intermittently activating with the switch in any position. With freezing, fumbling fingers, I grabbed a Phillips screwdriver (always keep a multi-head screwdriver in your plane), opened the access panel in the tailcone, shoved my hands through the tiny, sharp-edged access hole (we don’t pay mechanics enough), turned the main switch on the ELT unit from “arm” to “off”, disconnected the antenna and wires, and figured out how to remove the unit.

Just as I was finishing, a SAR person walked up to the airplane to talk to me. He was very friendly and reassuring about the whole thing as he copied down the details from my ELT box (recertified May 2006) and confirmed the time that I shut down the unit, so that the SAR centre could close the file on the activation. I also learned a couple of interesting tidbits:

• In the case of an UNSAR, standard procedure (if the owner or pilot couldn’t be located fast) used to be to get access to the plane as fast as possible causing as little damage as possible, but after complaints, SOP is now simply to wait for the battery to die.
• Further to the first point, the equipment used by the SAR satellite monitoring centre is now good enough to distinguish the idiosyncracies of the crystal used in each specific radio, so that one ELT signal won’t prevent them from distinguishing another one (though it must make it no fun for airliners, and FSS and ATC units that have to monitor 121.5 continuously).

It also turns out that this weekend there was a survival training camp at Rockcliffe hosted by the SAR people, so my UNSAR gave them a chance to practice homing in on a real ELT signal on 121.5 (usually they have to use separate training frequencies). While I’m very sorry for all the hassle caused to so many people, I’m glad that some tiny good came out of it.

Today I’m taking my ELT unit into the avionics shop to have it reinspected (I expect that it’s fine) and to have the battery tested, since I don’t know how much it drained during the activation. After that, I’ll reinstall it in the plane, but won’t reconnect the cockpit switch until I can have it inspected as well (I’ll placard that the script is U/S and will write a snag in my Journey Log to cover the legal bases). I’m also going to remove the pilot-side panels to see if there is water getting in there somehow.

I could legally fly the plane for 30 days without an ELT as long as I put a placard in the panel, but I have a Hope Air flight coming up across hundreds of miles of nothing (the kind of area where every building is shown on the map, and there’s enough room for a small U.S. state in-between them). The ELT activation was an accident, but flying across wilderness in winter weather with no ELT would be just stupid.

So, for those of you considering becoming aircraft owners, are you still interested? Even with a simple plane like a Cherokee or 172, you can expect 2-to-5 unexpected minor crises like this every year, though most don’t involve anyone but you.

Since I moved from Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier International to Ottawa/Rockcliffe at the beginning of this month, I’ve had a chance to take only two flights, but with two drastically-different results.

Yesterday, under a low ceiling and poor visibility in showers, I made my shortest-ever point-to-point trip in an airplane, flying the 7 nm from Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier to my plane’s new home at Ottawa/Rockcliffe.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of light aircraft based at Rockcliffe, of all descriptions: the largest is a shorter-bodied version of the Piper Navajo, and the smallest are Cub-sized two-seaters and similar. There are many vintage and unusual aircraft tied down along the long rows of the flightline.

While one of the Rockcliffe instructors and I were standing in the rain kicking, raking, and digging through the mud trying to find the long-disused tie-down chains in my new spot, he mentioned that he thought my plane was the only Warrior on the field (though there are many other Cherokees). Who’d have figured that a Warrior, of all planes, would stand out on a flightline? I’m glad I don’t fly anything more mundane, like, say, an Ercoupe — I’d hate to blend into the crowd.

Note to American readers: while the Warrior is a very common training plane in the U.S., it’s not very popular in Canada — until the mid 1990s, spin training was required for a Canadian PPL, and unlike the Cessna 172/150/152, Warriors are not certified for intentional spins.

After a lot of agonizing, I’ve decided to move my Warrior from Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier (CYOW) eight nautical miles northeast to Ottawa/Rockcliffe (CYRO) effective 1 October. The short flight means a huge number of changes for me: I’ll be leaving Canada’s 6th busiest airport, where you have to tune in three different frequencies (ATIS, Clearance delivery, and ground) before you even start taxiing, and moving to an uncontrolled airport in the middle of parkland by the Ottawa River. Here’s a shot of part of the flight line, taken from the clubhouse porch:

I’ve flown into, maybe, 30 or 40 different airports, from tiny grass strips to huge international airports much busier than CYOW, but coming home from a long trip I’ve always know that there was a lot of support waiting for me, including two ILS approaches, several FBOs, heated hangars for deicing, emergency equipment, all types of servicing, washrooms available 24/7 for desperate passengers, etc. Now, I’m going to be arriving at an airport with no instrument approach, one tiny maintenance shop on the field, and a barbeque that never seems to stop churning out hamburgers (little use to a vegetarian like me, sadly). It’s going to be a big adjustment. One nice feature is the Canada Aviation Museum on the south side of the field, across the runway from the tie-downs:

I’ve never kept my plane anywhere but the big airport. I did my primary flight training, night rating, and instrument rating there, and when I bought my Warrior, the broker flew it in from Toronto and we did the preflight there. I have no regrets about training at a busy airport — I know too many pilots who are terrified of ATC and busy airspace, but I’ve flown around Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia (as well as many smaller airports) with no problem at all, because I was used to the radio work right from the start. When I was first asking about flying lessons, flight schools at small airports gave me a lot of BS about higher training costs or long delays at towered airports, but they didn’t turn out to be a problem, and I feel like I would have had only a partial education learning to fly somewhere like Rockcliffe.

Now, though, the expense is catching up with me. I have a very good deal on a tie-down spot with plug-in at the big airport, but when I add up landing fees and other costs, I calculated that it’s costing me about $1,000/year more to park at Macdonald-Cartier than it will at Rockcliffe (they’re the same distance from my house), even when I factor in two diversions/year for weather and the resulting cab fares and parking expenses. Next year, when Nav Canada brings in their new user fees for large airports, I calculate that the price difference will jump to $1,500/year. I won’t speculate about how hard a commercial pilot like Aviatrix or Sulako has to work to make that much, but it’s a lot for me, too, especially with two daughters hitting university in the next decade.

Here’s my new tie-down spot. It doesn’t look like much, but presumably, there are tie-downs and some paving stones under all that grass and weed:

It’s not just a matter of money — I’m hoping that a new airport will give me a new start with flying, maybe bringing me closer to other pilots and to my plane itself. Rockcliffe seems like a much more pleasant place to spend a sunny afternoon waxing the plane or BSing with other pilots in the clubhouse (or mowing my parking spot), even if I can’t eat the burgers.

I spent a bit over an hour today flying a spanking-new Cirrus SR22-GTS, courtesy of Easy Air Share, which is setting up a fractional ownership program here in Ottawa. I flew in the left seat with Floyd, a production test pilot from Cirrus, in the right seat. Here, as a counterpoint to a previous Cirrus posting, are some of my initial impressions:

Best feature:

electric elevator and aileron trim — I used it religiously to relieve control pressures.

Second best feature:

pilot-side door.

Most overrated feature:

the glass panel (it’s cool, but it’s more information than I really want when I’m flying, especially VFR).

Hand flying:

slightly more slippery than a Warrior, but after a bit of practice, it was no problem holding heading and altitude — the stuff people say about needing the AP to fly is BS.

Instrumentation:

I missed the analog altimeter and gyro compass (there was a backup altimeter at the bottom), but I got used to the tape display fast enough.

Landing characteristics:

slightly higher approach speed, but otherwise almost identical to landing a Cherokee or 172.

Power:

I’d like to be able to choose my own RPM on the CS propeller; the engine flew nice and smooth lean of peak, though.

Castering nosewheel:

no big deal, no big problem.

Sidestick:

no big deal, no big problem, except that it requires very small inputs compared to a Cherokee or 172.

Leg room in the back seat:

(tested on the ground) very spacious.

Autopilot:

smooth and well integrated.

Four-point harness:

extremely comfortable.

Sound system:

nice, but not a big deal for me.

Chute:

no opportunity to observe.

Would I mind owning a share of an SR22? Not at all. It feels like a great machine for long cross-country trips, and I know my family would love every second in it. But I couldn’t help thinking how much more fun that same flight would have been in my trusty old Warrior, slow speed, and all. I love working on computers; I don’t know if I love flying them.

Niss, who flies out of Barrie Airpark (CNA3), left this comment on my posting Should I buy or rent? (divide all prices by about 1.2 to get US dollars):

I am looking to buy a share in an aircraft. Right now at my local airport (CNA3) there is a 1966 Piper Cherokee 140 on the ramp. The owner is looking for $32500 and I am told that he might be interested in selling off 25% Shares. TTSN: 5693 HRs SMOH: 1917 HRs, cylinders were redone 400 hours ago. The broker that is selling it is my old boss and mentor at the airport, so I know the salesman and the owner are reputable. Also I am a student, am looking to go on to bigger and better things including my CPL and other rateings. What do you guys think this animal would cost in maintenace fees, etc? Would you say this is a wise decision for a student?

Niss - that sounds like a reasonable starter aircraft for VFR. If you want to go on and get your instrument rating, you should know that the panel is probably not in the standard T arrangement, unless someone has had it redone; you might also need to make some changes to the panel and add an alternate static air source if the plane is not currently IFR-ready. Neither of these should be a deal killer, but it’s good to be aware. Go for a test flight in the plane (you should pay for the gas, and the owner or broker should be with you) and see how you like it.

Before you plunk down about CAD 10K (including tax) for a 25% share, you need to have a thorough prepurchase inspection done by a mechanic who has never worked on the plane — that might mean bringing someone in for the day from Brampton, Markham, Peterborough, or another city nearby. Expect to spend at least CAD 1K on the inspection, maybe more if there are any areas of concern. Obviously, it would be nice to get all the 25% partners together first so that you have to do the inspection only once and can split the cost — otherwise, each will have to do his or her own inspection. A proper prepurchase will take a full day and involve a detailed review of the logbooks (including airworthiness directives and service bulletins), removing the cowling and all inspection plates, checking compressions, looking for corrosion inside the wings, etc. The plane will probably be put up on jacks, and if there are any concerns, the seats might come out as well to allow better access to the interior. You should also review the logbooks yourself to see how often the plane has flown (if it flies less than 100 hours a year, look at it carefully; if it flies less than 50, be concerned; if it flies less than 25, be *very* concerned), whether there is any damage history, and how often parts are replaced. When’s the last time the vacuum pump was replaced, for example? How old is the battery? How old are the tires? Are the gyros getting elderly? This might be too much to worry about for your first plane, but you can bet I’ll be checking if or when I buy my second — even if the individual parts are relatively inexpensive, it gives you a good idea of how well the plane has been maintained.

Remember that the time on the engine has a lot to do with the value of the plane. Including removal, shipping, and reinstallation, an engine overhaul for a Lycoming O-320 costs at least CAD 25K, maybe more like CAD 30K. Is the engine on this plane just about run out (2000 hours)? Has the engine been giving trouble and getting a lot of top work (new cylinders)? Are the compressions OK? The mechanic can help with that. Many people believe that a half-time engine (~1,000 hours) is the best deal — a brand-new overhaul done just to sell the plane might be shoddy, while a run-out engine will require you to take the time to do the overhaul and break in a new engine. Likewise, beware of any plane sold with a fresh annual — that has no value to you, since the seller will probably defer any marginal items.

Expect all the partners combined to spend about CAD 5K/year on maintenance, excluding engine reserve, if the plane is in good condition — that includes replacing radios, pumps, tires, batteries, starters, etc. as they fail. The plane will also need to be painted every decade or two, at a cost of over CAD 10K Some AMEs will let you help with the maintenance, reducing the cost a bit, but whether that’s a reasonable trade will depend on how much your time is worth. The problem is that there’s a lot of variability — you might pay $2,000 one year, and $8,000 the next. You’ll spend about $2,000/year on insurance, given the low airframe value, and gas and oil will depend on your flying (estimate about CAD 35/hour for gas, depending on where you buy it). Parking will depend on where you decide to keep the plane — you’ll want at least an electrical plugin if you plan to fly in the winter. A hangar can be expensive, but also much more convenient (and you can split it four ways).

One of the first questions that occurs to new pilots is this: buy or rent? A lot of people write about this question online and in print, and they mostly try to help you make the decision by opening a spreadsheet to figure out the cost of owning and operating a plane, dividing the cost by the number of hours you’re likely to fly, and then comparing that with rental rates. I took that approach before buying my Warrior.

That approach is completely useless.

When renting doesn’t work

I spent a few months as a renter after my plane was hit by lightning, and the experience reminded me why I don’t rent. Unless you’re willing to book weeks or (more likely) months in advance, you’re not going to be allowed to take a rental airplane away for a whole weekend, much less a whole week. If you are allowed to take a rental plane for that long, and the weather cooperates (remember that you cannot leave a day earlier or come back a day later), you’re usually going to have to pay a minimum fee — say, 3 hours/day — whether the plane flies or not.

That money adds up fast. If I rented a Cessna 172 for CAD 120/hour dry to fly from Ottawa to PEI for a week in the summer (about eight hours’ flying round-trip), my cost before fuel and taxes would be not CAD 960 for eight hours, but CAD 2,520 for 21 hours, even though the plane was tied down for most of that. Add about $300 for fuel, and you’re well over CAD 3,000 total for the trip. Of course, the odds of getting a 172 for a full week in the summer are so small that this is mostly hypothetical.

When renting does work

On the other hand, rental planes are almost always available for two or three hours, even on the weekend. If you want to just fly around the area to take friends up for sightseeing, or work on a rating, or fly with a buddy for a quick lunch at a nearby airport, renting works great, and you’ll save a lot of money over owning.

If one rental plane is down for maintenance, you can just take another one. If the plane makes a funny noise during runup, you can just taxi it back to the hangar and hand the problem over to someone else. If all you want to do is fly a plane the way your friends use their boats, a few hours at a time on nice weekends, then renting is a very low-stress solution.

Making the decision

So, if you’re a new pilot trying to decide whether to buy or rent, ask yourself this: do you want to do nothing but fly around the area on Saturday afternoons, or do you want to go places on overnight trips? If you want to do any non-trivial amount of travelling, even just a couple of family or business trips every year, you can put away your spreadsheet, because owning — either alone, in a partnership, or as part of a fractional ownership program — is really your only choice.

Owning is often expensive, but it does not have to be, especially if (unlike me) you’re willing to share a simple, slow plane with a few partners: 25% of a Cherokee 140 in a 4-way partnership will cost you as little as CAD 10,000 up front (which you’ll get back — less sales tax — when you sell), maybe CAD 2-3,000/year in fixed costs, plus fuel and engine reserve for each hour you fly. It will also, of course, cost you the headaches of ownership, including arranging maintenance, paying unexpected costs, changing oil, cleaning bugs, waxing wings, shovelling snow, finding alternatives when the plane is down for a few months for painting or engine overhaul, taking time off work to go to the shop, etc.

Airplanes aren’t like cars

It’s too bad that renting planes cannot be more like renting cars. Our family gets by with only one vehicle — we live near downtown, and when there’s a conflict and one of us cannot walk or take transit, we use VRTUcar (an extremely inexpensive shared car program — there are two parked a couple of blocks from my house) for in-town travelling, or we rent a car for out-of-town trips. The money we save from not owning a second car covers a huge part of the cost of owning our plane. Go figure.

Back in July 2005 (updated in September), Philip Greenspun published a detailed owner’s review of his factory-new Cirrus SR20, the 200 hp (cheaper) sibling of the Cirrus SR22. Philip has flown his plane pretty seriously around a huge part of the continent (including the Canadian arctic), and has a long list of both the good and bad aspects of it. There are dozens of annoyances — large and small — that you’d never know about after reading a glossy magazine review written on the basis of a single test flight.

Philip also speculates about the actual safety value of the chute. In his opinion, most or all of the cases where people have pulled the chute and survived would have been survivable in a non-chute equipped Piper or Cessna, while in the cases where the chute really was necessary, it failed and resulted in a fatal accident. I don’t know how accurate this analysis is, but it’s an interesting perspective, especially coming from a Cirrus owner.

This page is highly-recommended reading, even if (like me) you cannot imagine ever being able to afford a factory-new plane. The 6-8 week, USD 10,000/year annuals — while still under warranty — are certainly an eye-opener. I wonder how much he’ll pay for maintenance when the plane is a little older and the warranty has expired. It sounds like a pretty nice plane, though, on balance, and I certainly wouldn’t turn one down.

Update: WordPress tells me that this is my 100th post. Whoopie!

Update 2: I went for another test flight on Friday, and the problem is fixed.

When you land after a flight, do you know — within a gallon/a few liters — how much fuel your plane should take? Some people always take off with full tanks and limit their legs to 2-3 hours, so they figure they never have to worry.

On Tuesday, I took my Warrior for its second post-maintenance test flight. I started with full tanks, flew for 2.75 hours at 75% power, then filled up again. The plane took 146 liters of fuel, over 50% more than expected, indicating that I landed with less than 45 minutes of fuel remaining. Upon closer investigation, there was some blue staining on the wing and a bit of streaking coming from under the left side of the cowling. My new fuel pump was leaking, throwing fuel overboard as I flew. I probably leaked fuel on my first flight as well, but since I didn’t start with full tanks, it was harder to be certain (I mentioned my concern to my AME then, but we saw no evidence of leaks inside the cowling).

I’m glad that I insisted on a second test flight before making the 800 nm trip to Atlanta, but I’m also glad that I routinely track my fuel consumption and know what to expect at the pump — it’s as important as being able to read the panel instruments during flight. Unlike a Cessna (with its “both” fuel setting), my Piper would have warned me of a problem when the first tank ran dry, giving me a few minutes to land with the remaining tank, but fortunately it didn’t come to that. A new fuel pump will arrive by courier tomorrow (Thursday) morning from the engine shop.

Today I took my Warrior for its first flight with the overhauled engine installed. I haven’t flown it since 13 July, and it was a nice feeling, despite high winds and a lot of low-level turbulence. I was supposed to test fly the plane last Monday, but there was still enough magnetism in the firewall (the one big part that didn’t get sent off for degaussing) to keep the magnetic compass from working.

You can read more about the lightning strike that grounded my plane in past postings.

The engine finally came off my plane earlier this week, and it should be on its way to Halifax today for a complete teardown and inspection after my lightning strike in July. I snapped a few cell-phone pictures while I was in the shop.

The first photo shows the propellers from a twin that was forced to do a gear-up landing after both the regular and manual gear extension failed — without the gear, the spinning propellers hit the pavement on landing. The pilot was smart enough to land the plane normally rather than trying to slow down and stop the props first — the props aren’t pretty, but the pilot’s unhurt and the plane, despite some damage, will fly again (hopefully before late fall).

The second is a front view of my magic magnetic engine, with the propeller and cowling removed. If you’re not used to looking at airplane engines (because, say, you rent planes that have only tiny oil-filler doors), the first thing you should note are the huge cylinders, compared to what you’d find in a car engine. Personally, I’m a bit concerned with what looks like damage on the prop spinner plate (I hadn’t noticed it when I was taking the picture).

The third is a view of the accessory drive on the back of the engine — there are various attachments there to allow the engine to spin things that, well, are supposed to spin, as well as room for other toys. The white thing in the middle is the oil filter, which gets replaced with every 50-hour oil change. One of the first things a new private owner-pilot learns is how to cut the safety wire, remove an old oil filter, cut the filter open to look for metal, attach a new filter, and safety wire it. On my plane, it’s possible do all of that without even taking off the cowling.

The dark thing just to the right of and slightly lower than the oil filter is the right magneto, which spins around to generate power for the spark plugs — there is a wire from the magneto going to one plug on each of the four cylinders (the left magneto also has a wire to a separate plug in each of the cylinders, for redundancy). Magnetos are maintenance hogs, and sometimes need to be rebuilt every few hundred hours, but fortunately the costs are not too high.

The grey, red, black, and white thing to the right of and slightly above the oil filter is the vacuum pump, which spins around to create suction to drive the gyros in the attitude indicator and heading indicator. Dry pumps like this one last 1,000 hours on average, but can fail at any time; even worse, unlike most parts, they give no warning — they go from 100% to 0% in a split second. Fortunately, I cannot find a single case of a fatal crash due to a vacuum pump failure in IMC on a fixed-gear plane flying IFR (the drag of the gear makes the plane easier to control), but there are many cases for retractables. Note to self: after losing vacuum pump in a retractable-gear plane, step #1 is lower the gear.

Here’s a close-up picture of the engine’s data plate (still can’t read it, though), and the carburetor. You know that my O-320 engine has a carburetor because of the bare “O-” prefix; if it were fuel injected, it would have an “IO-” prefix. Airplane engines almost universally use updraft carburetors, mounted underneath the crankcase — I’m not sure if there’s a good mechanical reason for that, other than avoiding having a hump sticking up in the middle of the top of the cowling. The throttle lever in the cabin pulls a wire around a series of pullies to a control on the other side of the carb (as does the mixture lever, I think). For some reason, the carburetor is much cleaner-looking than the rest of the engine.

That’s it for now. I’ve been up twice in a rental Cessna 172 to keep current, and hope to be flying my own plane again before the end of September.