Skydiver,
PM me with your email and you can have a copy of the draft Strathaven Airfield accounts for 2015/16: the finalised accounts will be posted on the airfield website in due course since the airfield is a not-for-profit organisation.
For you, and anyone else's information, the landlord (i.e. me!) was paid £36,000 (i.e. £3,000 per month) - which is less than what was fixed by an RICS valuer - and no airfield user (including me) was paid for any work they did on the airfield. We obviously paid contractors such as the company that installed the new fire hydrant etc.
In the first year as a not-for-profit there were some one-off costs, and as a result I had to lend the airfield about £6,000 to keep the books balance. In our articles of association, it is forbidden to pay any interest on loans.
As for the flying school, it actually has lost money for the previous few years. It is more difficult to publish the accounts for last year since we have basically had one full-time instructor so it could be a break of his privacy to publish everything. (As a rough guide, it has always been our policy that instructors can expect to be able to earn around the UK average wage). However, the accounts do include depreciation on our aircraft and the reality is that they are not actually depreciating - which is a bit weird! So we maybe didn't make a loss!
But my point is:
Since the punter taking up a member of the public shouldn't get paid for it, the premium for a professional here is just £4!
So is it worth the professional getting an FI rating?
Or, indeed, is it worth the flying school spending time with a newly-minted professional getting them into its way of doing things?
Or do we just sling Joe Public in an aircraft and collect the cash?
ps. The website I chose was the latest I could find, but you will also see it on what may be their previous one. As to company information/trading names/RTF/FTO etc, that seems sparse on both.
Online Shop
But my point was to raise this as an example of how little premium is expected for a professional. And my interest on what that premium in the rest of the country was. No plans, though, to introduce it here!