I can't afford to buy a 182, have you seen those prices? :-)

I have been fortunate enough to afford to fly the plane I have. I use it mostly for business where it really improves my ability to serve clients and saves man days for my staff. My staff is now far more willing to do site trips with the Citation.

I've notice that my business success ramps up to a new level right after I get that next level up airplane. I don't know if the plane creates the success, or my need to pay for it motivates me, but either way, it correlates to my business growing.

The Citation V will be the pinnacle of my aviation career. I'll fly it until I retire and then get something more sedate. But for now, I'm living the dream and liking it a lot.

Mike C.

I'd love to find a set of main wheels so I can have mounted spares ready to go. That would be very nice!

But Textron wants $43K list, $28K with my discount, for one wheel. That's $56K for a pair.

I'm okay having to remount my existing wheels when my tires need to be changed. Yup, totally fine with that.

Mike C.

Based on what Carlson said, I can buy two of my wheels for one of yours for new ones.

I am probably more likely to be able to find my wheels in salvage. More were made and they were made longer ago.

Still, it does seem like wheels are ridiculously expensive.

Mike C.

Based on what Carlson said, I can buy two of my wheels for one of yours for new ones.

I am probably more likely to be able to find my wheels in salvage. More were made and they were made longer ago.

Still, it does seem like wheels are ridiculously expensive.

Mike C.

Probably garbage.

With no history, you don't know how many tire changes it has had. This is important since there is a schedule of NDT testing that needs to be done at prescribed tire changes.

Also, the pictures are perfectly of a resolution you can't see the actual part numbers on things. Not even the tires.

The pictures don't jibe with my wheels, they must be early 550 (and that's not certain). Certainly not a wheel that fits my plane.

The "overhauled but paperwork lost" is an extra nice touch.

Even if everything was correct, overhauled, had paper work, had 8130, had history, I would never pay more than half new for a used part anyway.

Mike C.

At $28k each for a relatively consumable part it sure seems like the aftermarket would step in.

I’ve often wondered why there is no PMA manufacturer in the market of these relatively simple but absurdly priced jet parts.

This is fantastic information Mike and I applaud you for your willingness to be so transparent with your expenses.

Overall, you're doing this on far less cabbage than the bulk of Citation operators, I would guess, but you're very much a hands-on guy that does his homework and actively shops every aspect of ownership.

The factor missing in your analysis is the time investment in your ownership experience (shopping for parts, researching, doing some of the work yourself, etc). If you take your time investment, that would likely be 2x for the typical Joe pilot as you impress me as someone who is a highly quick study on everything. Now factor the value of your time per hour and include that in your expenses. I get that you enjoy all this and that it's likely very rewarding for you but it is a factor.

For myself personally, I seriously doubt I would have the time to invest in the ownership experience you've chosen. I'm not necessarily a toss the keys to the mechanic and write a blank check but I lean far more on that side of the spectrum that you do, simply because my time is a very rare commodity these days.

I can't afford to buy a 182, have you seen those prices? :-)

I have been fortunate enough to afford to fly the plane I have. I use it mostly for business where it really improves my ability to serve clients and saves man days for my staff. My staff is now far more willing to do site trips with the Citation.

I've notice that my business success ramps up to a new level right after I get that next level up airplane. I don't know if the plane creates the success, or my need to pay for it motivates me, but either way, it correlates to my business growing.

The Citation V will be the pinnacle of my aviation career. I'll fly it until I retire and then get something more sedate. But for now, I'm living the dream and liking it a lot.

Mike C.

What we do with our time is something everyone should carefully consider. I have made maintaining my airplane into a hobby. By definition, a hobby is a "waste" of time (be it golf, boating, flying, whatever) in that you are not compensated for it but you do it because you enjoy it. I actually enjoy learning about my airplane, troubleshooting things, and doing the actual work on it. If that's not for you, then it will feel like work for which you're not getting paid.

I wouldn’t call wheels “consumable.”

I believe decades of life is the norm.

That's a very good way of putting it Chris. I enjoy learning about the airplanes that I fly but not nearly as much as I enjoy other 'hobbies' like volunteering, church activities, golf, friend / family time, etc. I'd rather pay more to have someone else turn the wrench in order to free that time up for other activities but that's just me.

I couldn't agree more. I love working on planes. Doesn't matter if it is avionics or maint. The fact that I can work on my own gives me a lot of satisfaction, and I've spent a career working on other peoples planes.

I'm tired of supposed experts saying I can't be doing what I am doing. The primary reason jets cost more to operate is that people cede their authority to manage the maintenance to shops that chose expensive strategies.


I'm not really doing all that much different than when I owned my 170. The scope is larger, sure, but the strategy is not. Being involved saves me money.


It isn't as time consuming as it appears. It is mostly KNOWLEDGE and not TIME. For example, send your ACM turbine to Qualified Technologies in Upland, CA. This tidbit was given to me by another mechanic because he noticed the Textron supplied part had a Qualified OH tag on it. Okay, a quick call to them and I now know the real people doing the work and can skip the middlemen. So I am not spending hours here, just using my contacts and collected knowledge.

I did do the ACM package tear down and rebuild. But I chose to do that because I wanted to and I wanted to know how it works very intimately. I could have had the shop do it. Likely it was maybe 30-40 hours invested, so maybe $4-5K labor saved, so not a big factor in my operating cost. The shop did the package R&R in the airframe, that's not my kind of work.

I also write up my experience and information so that others on CJP can do the same. I might be saving me $100K/year, but I'm potentially saving others a significant multiple of that, potentially $millions for other operators.

(This is not an isolated case, I spent some time on the FCU AD issue for TPE331, including, with others, going out to Long Beach, CA to meet with the FAA ACO office, and we achieved an AMOC that didn't require FCU overhaul or replacement, just periodic spline inspections. This saved about $100M for the TPE331 fleet.)

Sticking my nose into stuff saves me money and I pass it along.

Another thing I did at the phase inspection was rebuild my aft toilet room cabin dividers. They were in bad shape, with moldings coming off, broken catches, busted stops, the upper wings off track, etc. I took them home, disassembled them, redesigned the door catch (I CADed a new bracket and had a local machine shop make it), rebuilt the doors, and then the shop put them back in. They work nice now! They probably haven't been used 3 times in the last year, but still, I want them to work right.

I wanted to buy new latches for the door, Textron had them in stock:

5 minutes of Googling revealed I can buy the EXACT SAME THING for $0.99/each at a cabinet hardware store. There's a cool $1K saved in 5 minutes, which translates to $12,000/hour net pay. My time is clearly not worth that!

Handing keys to a service center is not zero time, either. There is a lot of logistics to move the plane and go get it later. I realize that when looking at my MU2 experience. Having local maintenance is a huge win.


But yet you read and post on BT. So you obviously have SOME time you could spend on aircraft management.

Everybody gets to choose how to spend their time and money. For me, I can't own a jet unless I manage it personally. I'm basically a one man flight department for my company.

Mike C.

There are different strategies of aircraft ownership. That tends to reflect in the choice of aircraft age as well.

Operating an older airplane successfully requires technical knowledge, owner-involvement, and time commitment to do research and hunt for parts. It especially takes time. More than I tend to realize I have to admit.

I would be curious if Mike C. is tracking his time. If converted to billable hours, how much is his time worth.

I actually enjoy working on things with my hands too, so I understand.

But it has worked well for me. I too am an engineer. Didn't go to MIT, just community college and a state university. The rest was school of hard knocks. But I've always had the knack for figuring things out and good with tools.

The key there is being able to choose a good candidate airplane to buy. That covers the condition of the plane as well as the availability of aftermarket and boneyard parts.

Also I've never seen any relationship to quality of work being proportional to whether it was by the A&P working out of his pickup truck or the ShinyJet(tm) Inc. certified maintenance facility.

Of the 3 aircraft I've owned, the vast majority of problems I've had to correct were induced by prior maintenance, usually at the hands of a certificated A&P or shop. I will say, the standard of work in the 1960's seems better than in more recent years.

But not everyone is an engineer or good with a wrench.

For some operators, brand new, and rely on reputable, even if overly expensive, big name shops for maintenance. It doesn't mean they're "good" it just means they'll eventually change enough parts to fix whatever went wrong. Probably inducing a great deal of entropy along the way. But if the owner runs through the warranty period and sells the aircraft while it still has a bit of the new-airplane smell on it, they usually do OK. This owner usually wants predictable dispatch and expenditure.

At the other extreme end, are the owners who will buy at bottom dollar and simply run the thing until it just won't go anymore. If something stops working and it can be placarded "inop" that's what will happen. They're just going to squeeze it for every minute of flight time and dump it. That's the "disposable plane" crowd.

If you put the over/under at $1,000 per hour, I'll take the over. He's saving a fortune.