I have a rather unusual arangement for my 172.
A High School buddy of mine was eager to get into owner mode, but didn't have a lot of dough.
At the time, I owned a 150M that I had outgrown.
All conventional models assume 50/50 ownership and 50/50 use. We spent at least a month going over various ideas and traded spreadsheets back and forth. I recall emails that sounded like, "OK. Pretty close, but what if I got sick and you flew the wings off the plane. You'd be using my share."
The key breakthrough was to realize where the costs come from and how to apportion them.
Everything having to do with flying is directly proportional to the guy in the left seat.
A few expenses (tie-down, insurance) are split 50/50 because they are associated with owning and not flying.
The last big category has to do with capital.
If a partner purchases 30 percent at the beginning, he is owed 30 percent of the sale at the end.
The capital account is also a way to handle upgrades.
Obviously, none of this works with the wrong partner.
In our case, we've been running strong for 3 years now.
The spreadsheet handles the fact that I fly 75 percent of the hours and own roughly 90 percent of the airplane.
A year contains 8760 hours. A really busy privately owned airplane will fly only 200.
Statistically, it's waiting around for 8560 hours. Scheduling is a problem only once in a great while.
