General Aviation Economics 101

If I offered to sell spare time to you for $10 per hour, would you buy?

I have a confession to make. Like most people, I used to view flying small planes as an expensive hobby and general aviation as an overpriced form of transportation. As a pilot, that’s quite a mouthful. Two things have happened this year which completely altered my viewpoint.

First, I rented a jet ski and a small water ski boat for the first time. This brought me face to with the high cost of renting these toys. I paid $70 for half an hour of the jet ski and $80 an hour for the small boat. I can rent a an older Cessna 152 (two seater) for $65 an hour or a Cessna 172 (4 seater) for about $80 an hour. I can rent gorgeous, like-new planes with leather interiors and all the whiz-bang avionics for about $100-135 an hour. Compared to boats, the planes look pretty reasonable.

Second, I have been doing some careful evaluation of the costs involved in owning my plane. There are two classes of costs, fixed and variable. The fixed costs are the things that you pay for whether you fly or not, such as insurance, an annual inspection, a hangar, and updates for the databases in the GPS units. The variable costs are the things that you pay for only when you fly, including fuel, oil, and setting money aside for maintenance.

I rolled everything together to get one number, even amortizing the fixed costs across my anticiapted usage for the plane for the coming year. The magic number ended up being $93.73. That means that it costs me $93.73 to run the plane for one hour, including gas, insurance, and everything else that I could think of.

I recently made a couple of trips with the plane which gave me cause to think about how flying somewhere compares to driving to the same place. First was a trip to Madison, WI followed by a Thanksgiving trip to Kalamazoo, MI.

We do not generally sum up the operating costs of cars as carefully as I did for the plane. For instance, when was the last time that you analyzed the cost of garage space for your minivan? Fortunately, though, the IRS publishes a reimbursement rate for automobile travel which is supposed to incorporate all expenses involved in operating a vehicle. That number is currently $0.405 per mile.

With the help of a spreadsheet (OpenOffice.org, of course) and Google Local for the driving distances and times, I came up with the following table for a one-way trip from St. Charles, MO to Madison and a round-trip between St. Charles and Kalamazoo.

When all is said and done, the plane costs more to operate than the car but it also saves a ton of time. One way to think of the plane is as a time machine. For about $10 per hour, I was able to buy 10 hours of time during this past Thanksgiving weekend. I spent about six of those hours with my family and the remaining four hours simply relaxing at home instead of battling the traffic on the interstate.

That was one of the best hundred bucks I have ever spent.

[Update: May 8, 2006] AVweb just picked up on this subject in their short article, Flying Cheaper Than Driving?.