Interesting report. I guess the first question I would ask back to Avantair is "What are they doing fleet wide so that such occurances do not happen again?" When the Avanti was conceived at the start of the 1980s it's mission was to have the block time equivalent to or better than the Citation with the operating costs of a KingAir and the interior comfort near a Falcon 20. Depending upon the annual usage of an aircraft your freind has he could look at fractional (equity of card), outright ownership or make a block charter commitment with someone local. The old rule of thumb was that if someone used an aircraft at 300 hrs annually then ownership made sense but not everyone wants to actually deal with having their own flight operation. The Avantair offer to swap excess insurance value from the write-off to another aircraft sounds self serving. Be careful, fractionals have had a known tendency to use high residual values during their intitial sales pitch than what will be realized for their high utilization aircraft at contract end. Avantair is public so their financials should be available. At the market downturn they claimed to hold steady with ownership shares while NetJets, Flight Options and Flex Jet all lost customers. Jeff
$450hr? The P180 burns 120 gal an hour at cruise altitude, plus the cost of pilot(s), insurance, maintenance, hangar and that doesnt even include the $7mm to buy one or depreciation, did you mean $2,450 hr?
Ah, but Avantair is a fractional program. Capital cost is covered in the buy-in. Then there is the monthly management fee or whatever they call call it. Move more of the costs to the monthly fee and the hourly operation number can be smaller. Jeff
Numbers for operating cost are regularly suspect with any operation. There are aircraft owners that do charter that figure anything beyond fuel and hourly assesments for engines and other coverage programs is net contribution. For these owners they figure that the aircraft is going away if it charters or not. Nor will the flight department personell, the insurance, hangar or the other items change either. So in that consideration they are correct and chartering at anything above their direct payout for the flight it is a "profit". If Avantair is using this concept it isn't necessarily bad for an owner - they are getting all the fixed/mostly fixed costs from the monthly. For many private operators they should be looking at total annual budgets for the flight operation. If the aircraft is using borrowed money than somewhere that has to be accounted for. How are crew expenses handled on the road - company credit card or per diem allowance? How about crew hotels? Crew recurrent needs to be calculated somewhere. If the operation is using ex-pat crews then there will be rotations with airline costs. When flying outside of the US there are likely to be handling agents, overfly permits and other country & airport imposed charges. International ops will be higher and comparisions to a domestic operator need to be done carefully. Here is an actual example from a friend that is currently running a VIP Boeing. It is based internationally and using rotating crews. $8,500 an hour. No captial cost as the aircraft was bought for cash. no number is about 1 year old so it may have fluctuated somewhat. Jeff
an airplane does not need power to land ( once at the airport ), so the aircraft manufacturer is not an issue the PT-6 is a reliable workhorse of a power plant, unfortunate one of them quit, but not really an issue in the crash, the spare engine got them to the airport that leaves only the driver and his management of the situation, procedures for the situation are covered in the "how to book" and should have been practiced as part of operating procedures... the other item is the runway length from a safety point of view vs the Piaggio the issue becomes to decide whether to continue with the management company Avantair with respect to their management / training of their pilots and maintainance of the equipment. This incident should not reflect negatively on Piaggio or Pratt & Whitney
