Hello welcome back to Moorabbin Airport. Now since coming back from my two-week
trip around outback Australia there are usually two questions that people ask me.
The first question is usually why did I take a stuffed cow on the trip with me?
And the second one is how much did the whole thing actually cost. And so today
I'm going to answer one of those questions for you. So the reason why I
took milkshake on the trip with me was... Oh, the other question!
But how much did the whole thing cost well I'm going to be completely open with you in this
video and share all the costs that I incurred as part of this trip and I'm
also gonna give you some tips on how I budget for some of these larger trips so
if you are thinking of doing something yourself maybe you can follow a similar
structure and then you'll have a rough idea of how much the whole exercise is
going to cost you before you set out and fly. Now I was actually due to take Kilo
Juliet November for a flight today it's due for its 100 hourly and there's about
one and a half hours left on the clock I was just gonna go and use those up to
get a bit of practice but unfortunately the weather's not very good here at
Moorabbin. But talking of 100 hourly that is something that I'm gonna be working
with the guys from Blue Demon who do the maintenance on this aircraft to film the
hundred hourly maintenance process and if you've got any specific questions of
what goes on in a hundred hourly service then let me know in the comments below
and I'll see if I can cover that in the video that I'm making. Also if there's
any AOPA members watching out there I met with Paul the editor of Australian
pilot magazine yesterday to do a bit of an interview for the next edition also
looking to do some new content ideas with AOPA with new aircraft coming into
the country that I'm hoping to get into and film for the channel so you can see
them first. But yeah I just wanted to say if there's any AOPA members out there
what's up? But yeah because we're not flying today let's head back to the
office let's make a cup of tea and let's start going through some of those costs.
sSo there are four main areas that I want you to look at when you're planning your
costs and they are aircraft hire so the hourly rate you're paying for the
aircraft itself. Fuel kind of obvious. Accommodation costs. And then a kind of
bit of a catch-all bucket but I'm gonna call this transportation which really
includes things like taxis car hire. You can also add things in there like any
museums that you might want to visit sightseeing you want to do tours you
want to go on but I'm not going to look at those in this video I'm just gonna
focus on the bare minimum costs that you'll be expected to pay if you are
going to do a trip like this. So let me share the screen with you. So I'm going
to start off by making two columns I'm gonna put in a budget column and an
actual column. Now I always do a budget when I go on a trip like this because I
think it's really important to have an understanding of those costs before you
go out so that's why I've got the budget and then the actual column that's just
after the trip itself I put the costs in and I just do a bit
of a comparison and we'll do that now so you can see the difference between the
two. So let's start with aircraft hire so you want to put in basically the amount
that you're expecting to pay for the aircraft in our instance it's three
hundred dollars per hour that we pay as a dry rate for the Cirrus. And you want
to put in the total number of hours that you think you're gonna be flying now
I've budgeted thirty four hours for the outback trip and then your total which
here in Australia I'm gonna put in excluding GST because you might not have
that included in your hourly rate is simply the total hours times by the
aircraft hire which is that amount there so the total amount if you want to
include GST is simply just going to be that cost times one point one for ten
percent. So 11220 is what we're expecting to pay
for the aircraft higher for the thirty four hours that I was budgeting for the
trip. Now we can put in the actual cost and we know that the aircraft hire was
$300 we only flew 31.5 hours so if I copy these two and paste them in here
we can see that the actual was ten thousand three hundred and ninety five
as opposed to the eleven thousand two hundred which we budgeted for. Next up
you want to be looking at your fuel that's a relatively easy one to do as
well I basically do a fuel per liter cost and for the trip I budgeted an
average cost I thought it was gonna be around $2.80 per litre and that might
be low compared to what you're used to might be high you I have a look at some
of the airfields you're going to and work out you
can get really detailed on this but look, chuck in an average kind of value just
to get an idea in the budget of course by this point you should have an idea of
how many hours you're going to be flying and therefore how many litres you're
going to be burning. In our case we were going in gallons because of a u.s.
aircraft so I've worked out 503 gallons for the entire trip you would do this
multiplied by 3.8 which gives us 1911 litres. So a total for the
fuel is just our cost per litre which is $2 80 multiplied by the nineteen hundred and eleven so
we're looking around five thousand three hundred dollars worth of fuel. Now an
important point to consider when you are looking at budgeting for fuel that
assumes that you're running the aircraft fully rich for the entire trip that's
how I planned it because the total gallons or the total litres whichever
unit you're using that I used to calculate was based at the highest fuel
burn So in the Cirrus that was 16 gallons per hour but as you know if
you've watched some of the videos or if you fly a Cirrus you can lean that back
to around eleven and a half or twelve gallons per hour so this is real
worst-case but that's not a bad thing in the budget so you know that that's
probably the maximum amount you're going to be spending. The total amount that we
spent on fuel was three thousand eight hundred and thirty-four dollars and 35
cents. So the moment you start leaning the aircraft out you've got better
endurance and therefore of course your fuel costs go down as well. Then living
expenses so I put in accommodation as an average per night of a hundred and
seventy dollars and what I like to do with accommodation is added 20% buffer
on top of that and the reason why I explained in a previous video some
nights you're going to have to forego the accommodation that you've pre-booked
but you want to be able to do that on your trip without thinking oh look I've
booked accommodation at Kalgoorlie tonight and the weather's looking
rubbish so I could try and go there because I've booked the hotel or I know
I can get to this place with better weather but then I'm going to lose my
deposit on that hotel well. As a pilot you've got to be prepared sometimes to
lose that deposit and I build that into my budget here and that's what my 20%
fudge factor is all about in the spreadsheet. So I just add my 20% on top
which is just basically that times 1.2 and that gives me an accommodation
average nightly rate of 204 dollars. Then I put in a budget
as well for food because of course you're gonna want to eat on your way
around there. I put in about fifty dollars for food per day and then you
want to work out the total number of days you're on the road so we were gone
for 14 days so you just put in days 14. And all I'm doing here is I'm saying 14
multiplied by this plus this that's our daily rate and let's go to our basic
math we know we have to put that in parentheses and that gives us an
accommodation budget estimate around three and a half thousand dollars that
we're going to spend on the trip. Now I finished reconciling my accommodation
cost for the whole trip and we actually came in under that which was good. The
total cost was two six one five seventy seven which may seem a lot for a 14-day
trip and look there is one big cost in there as well that I should mention
which was the time spent in uluru was $900 for the accommodation for two
nights which sounds like a lot of money for accommodation and it is don't get me
wrong it is a lot of money especially compared to some of the other places we
were staying at. Do bear that in mind as well if you are going to maybe bigger
cities which are more expensive or tourist hotspots that you might need to
budget slightly higher for those in your accommodation. But fortunately with the
contingency we put in we actually came under budget on the accommodation as
well. Then finally I'm looking at transport and other like I say you can
put in here anything like tickets that you want to buy sightseeing that you
want to do I'm not going to do that now I'm just going to put in the
transportation costs that I had as part of this trip. That was car hire in Uluru
which I'd budgeted at $200 for one day. Taxis I'd assume that I was going to do
$30 let's do this, taxis per day was going to be $30 and I had 14 days
again. And so to work out the total all you have to do is just say the 14 days
times the taxis plus the car hire which gives us a total of six hundred and
twenty dollars budgeted. Now the car high was slightly less than expected
that was a hundred and eighty eight dollars and the total actually spent on
taxis was a lot less that was only 132 dollars and sixteen. So if we just add
those two up and that gives us three hundred and
twenty dollars and seventy three. Now once you've done those four columns you
can just do a total trip cost at the bottom which is just basically this one
plus this one plus this one in plus this one so the budget for the trip was gonna
be around twenty thousand dollars. How much did we actually spend? I can just
copy that across and you can see the expense for those items was around it
was just over seventeen thousand dollars. All right so why share that all with you
well this isn't an exercise in flexing, this isn't just a case of me wanting to
show how much the trip cost. But this to me like pretty much anything else with
aviation is an exercise in planning and preparation. One of the best things you
can do as a pilot is try and take as much stress away from you as possible
before you get in that cockpit. So if you've planned your budget beforehand if
you've built in contingency and if you've saved and you know you have the
money to pay for that trip then executing the trip actually well first
of all it takes the stress away, and it becomes more fun. Now of course this
isn't a cheap exercise and to be honest anyone watching this who loves aviation
who thinks any part of it is cheap you're obviously fooling yourself. You
know that there's money involved that you need to invest in the side of things
but if you choose to invest your money in aviation like I do then the best
thing you can do is be prepared about it. So plan yourself a budget, build in some
contingency, save the money for a trip like that, and then when you're actually
executing the trip you don't have to worry about money along the way because
you've planned it all out beforehand. All right I hope that was useful if you like
this then like this, if you're new to the channel and you haven't subscribed yet
do click on that subscribe button it's great to grow the community online here.
Otherwise thank you as always for watching and I'll see you in the next video.