A new version of the COPA Guide to Estimating Aircraft Operating Costs has recently been made available on the COPA website.
This 26 KB MS Excel application was designed to help pilots estimate just how much it would cost to fly any particular aircraft.
Over the time the guide has been steadily improving thanks to suggestions from COPA members and also operational experience.
New features within the guide include factoring in maps and publications costs along with GPS database costs.
The cost of borrowing money to buy a plane, including compound interest charges, is now included.
The latest version also allows multiple partners on a single aircraft to be included. Users can see how adding more partners will change fixed and hourly costs and the yearly and hourly bottom lines – all automatically!
The guide requires the user’s computer to have the MS Excel 2000 or XP spreadsheet application to work.
The guide includes a page of instructions and sample costs to make using the guide as simple as possible.
All the program user has to do is plug in the numbers for the aircraft in question in the yellow spaces and the spreadsheet calculates the fixed and hourly costs, adds them up, charts and graphs them “per year” and also “per hour”.
The COPA Guide to Estimating Aircraft Operating Costs is located on the COPA website in the “Members Only” section.
More suggestions for improvements and refinements are always welcome. Send your suggestions to ahunt@copanational.org.