[danyim]

Just curious—do you have an estimate for the actual operating costs? What does jet fuel go for and how much high are maintenance costs?

[sokoloff]

Figure $50K year in year out for maint and an occasional $100K bad surprise. $25K for insurance and training. $25K for rural hangar and some multiple of that for big city hangar.

Figure $2/mile for fuel on a long trip, $3/mi on a shorter hop. Jet-A ranges from $2.75/gal to $5/gal typically (with some outlier airports being higher). Fuel is heavy and hurts performance, so it’s rare to tanker significant quantities of “cheap” fuel.

Those figures are roughly right for a legacy Citation with JT15s. Bigger jets might be more. Newer jets might be more fuel efficient (and correspondingly more expensive to buy). A legacy Citation is a 50-150 hour/yr airplane. Fly it much more than that and you'd be better off in a newer Citation with the FJ44s (more expensive engines, much better fuel specifics).

[heelix]

One of my buddies transitioned from a turboprop to a lear. He would burn more fuel on the ground than we would would in a piston powered 182 for the entire trip. I think his burn rate was near 75gal/hour in the Cheyenne compared to our 12gal/hour or so. Figure $400/hour in fuel depending on what jet-a cost these days. Mind you, he went much faster/higher than what our bug smasher can do... you pay for that speed in fuel. For us, the next jump up to an old piston that could do 200kts/hour would likely burn 14-18gal/hour with a single engine.

Looking at our FBO here, Jet-A is ~$5.80/gal and 100LL is ~$5.50/gal

[sokoloff]

There are a variety of fuel programs (CAA, Colt, UVAir, others) to lower JetA prices significantly. It’s much more rare to be able to discount 100LL.

[hwbehrens]

On average, it looks like it's about μ=$3,655.91 per flight hour (σ=$2,036.95), with a high correlation with maximum passengers.

Cost per hour, per passenger is μ=$320.28, σ=$67.45, assuming the plane is full.

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2015/november/1...