A Cessna 172 Skyhawk costs around $40,000 - $50,000 used or $400,000 to buy new. Besides the price, fixed costs total about $800 to $5,000 per year for insurance, hangar fees, and regular maintenance. Variable costs, like fuel and engine overhauls, cost roughly $50 to $60 per hour of flight time.
The 172 Skyhawk is the perfect compromise. As you well know, all aircraft are compromises. The Skyhawk doesn’t do anything especially well, but it does everything well enough. 130 smph cruise? Not great, but not bad. Payload to carry three adults and full tanks? It would be nice to fill all of the seats and have full tanks, but how often do you fill the seats? And sure it’s more expensive than a 150/152; but it’s more capable than those, and less expensive to buy, own, and operate than a Skylane. There’s a reason why more Skyhawks have been built than any other aircraft, ever.
And there’s the rub. Winning a prize counts as income. There’s currently one 1964 Skyhawk on controller[dot]com. It’s $105,000. Assuming the raffle aircraft has a similar stated value, there’s [estimating] $30,000 in taxes that the winner will owe. Plus the fixed and variable costs of ownership.
There are 3 things you should always rent. Somebody please remind me why I got married again?
Seriously though … Thanks for the hard numbers. My Dad used to rent out our 172s for $15/hr wet. And they were later models than the one being raffled.
When I learned to fly in the early-to-mid-'80s, my dad rented me his 1970, 172K for $35/hour wet. That included the maintenance/insurance/etc. I think the FBO he leased it back to charged $55/hour.
I just checked the last place I rented several years ago. You can become a member of the club and get a discount. If you’re not a member, the rates are $184 to $189 (mostly Skyhawks, one Cherokee) per hour. Instructors are $72/hour.
BUT…
I just checked the website for an FBO at BLI, and they have three Skyhawks (two 16 hp, and one 180 hp) for $135/hour – which is more in line with what I expected. I called them before typing this, to confirm the prices are current.
Suppose I was Too Rich To Care. Could I replace the wings with ones that have electrically-operated flaps (and also add the conical-section wingtips), add a fillet to the tail extension, replace the seats with fully-articulated seats (I don’t know if the 172C had them), replace the spring-steel landing gear with tubular legs (and also replace the nose gear, because the original just seems to hang down too much in flight), put in a 172S glass panel, and swap in a 180 hp Lycoming and cruise-pitch prop? Obviously it can be done if the aircraft were registered in the Experimental category; but could all of those mods be done and still have the aircraft in the Utility category?
Damnit. All this cost figuring had me go check on the current status of the local club. Besides the 172 and the Cherokee 6 I remember, they now have an RV-9 and a Grumman Tiger. Rates are not bad (for the area especially - the 172 is $150/hr wet, tach time not Hobbs) and availability seems good.
IANA expert on GA mods. Last time I laid eyes on a Form 337 I was about 30.
But I’m going to suggest the answer probably depends a lot on the FSDO/GADO your mod shop is working with. The regs on mods aren’t that precise, so it’ll be up to the discretion of the Fed who signs off on revised certificate.
I was reading a NYTimes story about a January 2023 “near-miss” at JFK between two aircraft on the runway:
A close call at Kennedy International Airport Friday night in which an American Airlines plane crossed a runway in front of an oncoming Delta Air Lines plane appeared to have occurred when the American Airlines pilots misconstrued directions from air traffic controllers, radar records and recordings of those conversations show.
Later in the article they discuss cockpit voice recorders:
The safety board has urged the F.A.A. for years to require 25-hour recording capacity, noting in a 2018 report that “unfortunately, recent safety investigations have been hampered because relevant portions of the recordings were overwritten.”
I have long thought it a bit unbelievable that CVR’s normally only record 2 hours. Why aren’t they upgraded to record much longer times? Thinking of USB thumb-drives it seems clear that it would take no more physical space and cost about the same amount of money for the longer recording equipment (though of course there would be re-design and re-tooling costs, too).
What’s the hold-up? I know it comes down to money but what causes the delay in changing the policy on this?
As always with aerospace stuff the design and approval process will cost tens of millions for something sold only in the 10s of thousands. Plus the labor and downtime to retrofit the fleet. So everyone in the industry has an incentive to argue the costs exceed the benefits. Except maybe the folks who make CVRs.
Unrelated to that, FAA seems real big on pushing back at NTSB on various improvements that don’t enhance safety themselves, but just enhance investigations. Which might, thereby, enhance safety later as a second order effect. That’s a very old-fashioned attitude now that so much of accident prevention is about analyzing data associated with stuff that didn’t lead to an accident, but instead might have had things played out just a bit differently.
In a sense, FAA allots themselves $X million per year in costs to impose on the operators to buy increased safety. Somehow longer CVRs have never been the closest most urgent snake in any year to date. Or so FAA says they believe.
Even if FAA wanted to extend the duration, there’s a long-winded regulatory change comment and approval process of a couple of years to go from intent to mandate. For sure that could have been started any time in the last 10 years and would be long over by now. But given they haven’t started yet, that explains part of why it won’t happen sooner than a couple years from now even if they started tomorrow.
