HALIFAX
​PLANE SHARE
GROUP OWNERSHIP
Engine
Above all, a small plane like C-GXYO is safer when flown. That means it needs to be in the air for at least 150-200 hours per year.
The question is why? The engine, in particular, suffers from not being used. The engine in this aircraft has recently undergone a zero-time overhaul that by law can only be done at one of two Lycoming factories. To date, the engine has fewer than 100 hours on it.
This overhaul does not guarantee that the forecasted major overhaul date of 2000 hours will be met. Rather, if it is flown 150-200 hours each year it may be possible to make the 2000 hours since problems with corrosion will have been minimized. There is a lot of mythology surrounding Lycoming and Continental engines but one thing does stand out: careful, consistent and regular usage lengthens engine reliability and lifetime.
It may seem that 150-200 hours is not a lot of time. However, each flight requires flight planning, getting to the airport, preflight, etc.
Most flights average around two hours of air-time but take up much of a day. Therefore 150-200 hours actually corresponds to roughly 75-100 days. This means that group ownership is the only practical way to ensure these hours are flown.
Costs
Airplanes are expensive to build, to fly and to maintain. This is primarily because they are built to last and are maintained to a much higher safety standard than seen, for example, in automobiles.
There are two costs: fixed and variable. Fixed cost includes insurance, hangar, maintenance fraction, subscriptions, annual parts and labour etc. Fixed cost is the overhead required to have an airplane. For our airplane this cost is roughly 10K $/yr.
The variable costs are operational costs associated with flying. These include fuel and the wear and tear of flying. Our airplane has a small IO-360 fuel-injected 4-cylinder Lycoming that costs about 80 $/hr for fuel. Other variable costs are engine overhaul, a maintenance fraction, propeller overhaul, oil, paint, etc. and all of these are approximately 80$/hr.
The total variable cost to operate is around 160$/hr of airtime. Therefore operational costs to fly 150-200 hrs/yr are 24K-32K. Six owners flying equally would pay 4K-5K $/yr.
Fixed costs are paid on a monthly basis and. shared among six owners, are about 170 $/mon. A holiday is taken if a surplus greater than 7K occurs.
A yearly membership fee is levied as in other groups like golf clubs and in our case this relates to safety. For example, members only bear variable costs associated with air time. This encourages best practices on the ground and greatly enhances safety. This cost is shared equally by members in their yearly due.
Safety
The typical objective of group ownership is to share purchase and fixed costs. Our objective is to maximize safety while flying at reasonable cost. Safety relates to the airplane maintenance and pilot proficiency.
Our aircraft is maintained to what we believe are commercial standards. That means we have an onboard flight engineer to give full analysis of every six seconds of operation. These records are scrutinized and samples are sent out for analysis.
We change oil on an approximate 25hr schedule rather than a 50hr schedule. The reason is that we don't believe we fly enough. Lycoming's studies show that corrosion is the enemy. Unlike in automobile engines, aviation oil is changed long before it loses its lubrication properties. That is because the oil maintains the basicity of the internal engine environment to combat corrosion. Besides tearing down oil filters, opening metal screens and sending out oil for sampling at each oil change, we keep records of hours/liter of oil usage.
Airframe maintenance is treated the same way as the engine. We replace an entire elevator trim package when only a single part is worn.
Safety also hinges on having avionics that actually work. Autopilots that do what they're supposed to do. In short everything should be working to quote a friend who is a professional pilot.
The other half of the safety equation is the pilot. They must be proficient and fully understand the gear in the aircraft and know what to do when/if it fails. That means each member flies a minimum 1hr/mon and the cost of this hour is lost if they don't fly.