Costs............(Merged).

[J.A.F.O.]

Why is the UK so expensive?

I apologise in advance if this has been covered 1000 times before but I was reading through some threads that mentioned prices for aircraft hire here (UK) and overseas and I bl@@dy well want to know why it's so expensive.

Looking around it's about £100 an hour to hire a four seat single engine aircraft, when I first hired an aircraft (1986) it was about £80, so I thought £100 nearly twenty years later wasn't that bad but when I eventually opened my eyes and saw that it was less than half price elsewhere in the world I started wondering why.

Fuel costs can't account for it, we're not a particularly litigious nation so it can't be insurance against that. Are aircraft twice the price to buy in the UK? Is there too much red tape which hikes the price up? Why?

So, wherever you are, how much do you pay? And why?