N254CD has been sold. After 2 years of ownership my final observations are as follows:
Get a partner. With 2 people using the priority pilot scheduling, we never had a conflict. For all practicable purposes I had my own plane. The really nice part was when the $2,000 bill for the annual came, it only cost me $1,000. When I sent the $855 check for 3 months of hangar rental it only cost me $427.50, and when I sent the $6,000 insurance check it only cost me $3,000. The only down side was that without a partner, I would have sold the plane a lot sooner.
If most of your flying is for the pleasure of flying, rent. I only made one trip were I required advance reservations at my destination (it was canceled because of a CAPS SB). The second attempt was successful, but I had my first autopilot failure at the beginning of the flight and I should have canceled it again. The rest of my flights (except to the service center) were unplanned $100 hamburgers (which in some cases required 8 to 12 hour round trips), so I could have requested a rental plane, and if it wasnÂ’t available then I wonÂ’t go, no loss. The really nice part about renting is that if there is a problem with the plane, I tell the FBO and I go home. I donÂ’t have to fix it, I donÂ’t care what it will cost, how long it will require, where I have to take, or how I will make the arrangements.
What did the SR20 cost after 2 years, 1 month, and 14 days?
Cost of plane (purchase - sale) $81,000
Insurance 14,430
Hangar 11,348
Fuel 5,047
Maintenance 5,557
Inspections 2,923
Charts/databases 1,995
Fees & supplies 1,497
Oil 877
124,674
The plane was flown for a total of 250 hours, but 50 of those were from GAI to LNS and back for maintenance. So if you exclude those, then only 200 hours were used for the “mission”. If you assume the average time in the service center shop was 4 hours per visit then we spent 150 hours maintaining the plane for 200 hours of mission flight. It also means that the plane cost $623 per mission hour (not including the cost of capital). If you don’t like the mission hour concept then the cost drops to $498 per flight hour. Obviously, if we had flown more it would have cost less, but since it spent so much time grounded waiting for a service appointment or in the service center we really couldn’t fly it more. We had 25+ visits to the service center with an average wait of 2 weeks for an appointment, so half the time we owned the plane it was waiting for service.
The final observation is that, if for whatever reason you feel you most own, don’t buy new. The guy who bought our 2002 SR20 “C” for $145,000 got a much better deal than we got (assuming the plane, as some claim, will become more reliable as it gets older).