Originally Posted by
Forfoxake
I should have stressed that the less than £60 per hour includes the fixed costs eg permit, hangarage and insurance and it would actually be nearer £50 per hour if I wasn't forced to spend thousands of pounds replacing a perfectly serviceable 25kHz radio (recently) and a Mode C transponder (soon).
The marginal costs of oil/fuel (unleaded petrol) are only about £16 per hour and I rarely pay landing fees because I mainly land in fields. However, bear in mind that unleaded petrol in the UK is more like $6 per US gallon and 100LL Avgas can be more than $10 per US gallon.
For a more meaningful comparison for any readers from the USA, found this estimate of running costs with a Rotax 912 engined aircraft just posted by Southwest on the TeamKitfox forums:
"This is a close estimate of my operating costs. Mx items include replacing the Rotax rubber parts after 5 years, a new ELT as old one was AD'd illegal, etc. Hope this helps.
Fuel $ / gal 3.00
Hrs flown / yr 55
Fuel $/ hr 15.0
-- oil & fltr 1.22
-- plugs 0.32
Mx items 24.59 ( 2013 - 2017 avg)
Eng reserve 11.11
Prop reserve 1.50
Ins 9.09
$ / HR 62.83
$ / YR 3,456 "