Hey guys, just wondering what you guys thought…
My good friend has a very well cared for Cherokee 6 300 and is in awesome shape. He wants $100 per hour dry but the 300hp engine sucks on avg about 18gph and will cost rough ball park $100 per hour to run. Now obviously renting a warrior or skyhawk wet is still cheaper, but its nice to have keys to a plane that I can use anytime. do you think $200 an hour is a fair price?
Depends if you are talking tach hour or hobbs hour. Also 18GPH is a bit high. That plane should burn no more than 15GPH. Might be 13.5 to 14 in a 70% power configuration. If $100 includes insurance and is tach time, take it.
18 GPH is right on the money for a IO540K1G5 @ 75% unless you go above 9000 ft then the power falls off. Its a great plane,I flew one to most of the states East of the rockies. solid 150kts all day long! full or empty. mine would run great at 14000 ft I was on O2. I also went to PHX,JAC,DEN,ABQ And a few others in the high country and it did fine(turbo would have helped).
we were based near DAL
only had to pay $150 to be added onto his insurance for the year. Its a nice plane and I like not having to put a minimum time on it if I take it for the weekend like most flight rental places want a minimum number of hours on it if you take it overnight of for a whole day. Im just wondering if $100 an hour for that plane plus fuel is worth it? also does anyone know what the difference between hobbs time and tach time is? or the conversion?..Thanks
It has a few seats on it, might be able to split the cost? I have a group of pax who like to fly and help on the cost of the aircraft. That might make it a little more affordable?
I get 14 - 16 GPH in my Six in cruise, which works out to about 140 KTAS. It’ll burn 23 GPH on the climb out, and 10 - 12 GPH back down unless you just nose it over and plow down at the top of the green arc. I pay closer to $80/hr for gas than $100 most of the time.
If I bothered to account for the full cost of mine excluding fuel, I’d probably figure about $25/hr just for the engine reserve, $10 - $20/hr for insurance (depending on how many hours it flew a year), $30/hr for annual and random maintenance, plus a few more for oil changes, tie down fees, GPS database updates, and an emergency fund. Plus, depending on how the deal was structured and how many hours it was being flown, I’d have to start doing 100 hour inspections too, which would probably be about $12 / hour.
$100/hr dry is about fair for that aircraft, at the end of the day, it depends on how much you’re going to fly and take advantage of both scheduling and the capabilities of the Six, compared to whatever alternatives are around where you are.
Hobbs and tach conversion depends on how you fly. On mine, 75% power usually means I’m doing 2400 RPM above about 7000 ft, the difference between Hobbs and Tach for me is about 5% on the last 25 hours or so of multi-hour cross country flights. If you spend a lot of time on short flights where you’re spending a a fair chunk of time on the ground with the prop spinning, in the pattern, or down low at 2200 RPM, you’d probably see closer to 20% more on the Hobbs than the tach.