Dave Incognito,
What I mean is that when calculating costing for your aircraft, you spread the cost over the revenue hours or the airswitch hours.
eg 100 hours on the maintenance release you budget $2500 maintenance costs for that time. This can either be done as $25 per hour on the airswitch, or $21.75 on the VDO, if you use the reasoning that there are 115 VDO hours per 100 airswitch hours. So someone hiring the aircraft on airswitch pays a higher rate per hour as the fixed costs are being spread over less hours.
So nobody is getting "slugged", it's just another way of calculating the hourly rate.