Love and money don’t go together. This is particularly true for persons which are in the middle range of the money scale. This became obvious to me when I heard that a generous owner would have his personal high performance signle engine aircraft operated by a local aero-club. The man in question is in love with his plane – which I must admit is a very nice one.

Pilots have strong relations with the planes they fly, but for owners this is even stronger. I’m not criticizing that. However the idea of this plane’s owner was to lower the cost of ownership. He was not flying enough to get an interesting cost per hour for himself, so his goal was to leave club members fly with his plane… simply because he did not had a lot of money.

Things got complex because he had lot of love. To “protect” his beloved airplane, he started to define rules… many rules.

• Only pilots with more than 300 hours total time (ok, makes sense with a high performance complex plane)
• Pilots had to be “blessed” by one specific instructor – the owner did not trust all of them (well… this is not exactly the club spirit…)
• No training should take place in this aircraft except for familiarization (mmm, good way to reduce the average fuel flow, but is not a club also supposed to train its members ?)
• No legs of less than 40 minutes (here again, good way to reduce average fuel flow, but strong pressure on the pilots in case of unexpected problematic situation)

These rules certainly make sense from and owner point of view. It’s also true that some renter pilots don’t always care about plane as much as owners do. On the other hand, you can’t expect to use a club as a way to reduce cost without accepting club rules, and all the variety of pilots flying there.

My instructor once told me that the best way to make a small fortune in aviation is a large one… Don’t own a plane if you can’t afford it, or be ready to truely share it. The result of this particular story ? The deal has never been made.