If you rent at all the fuel price of the FBO is not relevant to you.For those of you that rent wet, why does the fuel price matter at all since the owner pays?
If you rent Wet the owner covers fuel, if you rent Dry you (the renter) is always charged the system fuel price (4.45 for AVGAS). It does not matter what the FBO price is. The owner pays the FBO price (and usually makes a profit as a result).
Note if you are flying a system airplane the airplane also always pays the system price (and ignores whatever price the FBO has set). This is designed to prevent an FBO owner from wet renting, and then refilling the plane as his FBO for $4000 a gallon.
FSE economics are weird. There's a lot of "support the new player" at the expense of owners. For example it's normal that when someone does an auction for a C172 that many people suggest he just gives it away to a new player. Low fuel prices are part of that dynamic (even though as brought up above it doesn't really matter). The reality is that FSE is designed so that the only way to make money is to fly. That's 100% ok considering the goals of FSE. However, for those of us who want to make "hands off" networks to grow a community it's very hard.IMO the FBO owners should NOT attempt to increase volume at the expense of making enough profit to sustain operations. Be business smart and let someone else sell fuel at cost or a loss.
Ground crew fees are a fixed part of the game that no one has any control over (include FBO owners). As the FSE forum has a strict "no discussion on changing game features" policy discussion on those fees can't really come up. Here is how the fees work:Why don't people complain about those fees? Is it because most just consider part of the cost of doing business? Or is it there isn't much control over ground crew fees where as there is some choice where to buy fuel?
You are always* charged a 10% ground crew fee. 5% goes to the departure airport FBOs (if there is more then 1 FBO at the departure airport they are split evenly among all FBOs unless it's a green job, then only the green job FBO gets the fee) and 5% goes to the arrival airport (using the same rules). It's the main source of FBO income. When we say TSP is profitable we mean that the ground crew fees Keith gets exceeds the cost of supplies (but not capital expenses)
*If there is no FBO at the departure or destination airport you don't pay that 5%
If we go down that route I don't think we can actually limit who we offer financing to (it could be interpreted as a violation of the "no paying for FSE items" rule in my opinion), however we would only advertise the existence of these services on the PE forum (we wouldn't post in the FSE forum {I'm not a fan of that forum personally}, have a google searchable website, or advertise the group within the FSE directories).If you plan to just provide financing to PE pilots that makes it much easier.
The calculation is rather simple to me on the financing side. If we need v$50,000 a month to run the FBOs then we would need a 10% yearly return on 6 million. We aren't interested in financing every FSE aircraft out there, just enough to get enough income to run the non profitable services. Once we finance that 6 million we'd close up to loans until some amount was paid back. Obviously there's some real world realities that will mess with those numbers, but that's the basic idea in my mind (with respect to financing).
Honestly the more I think about the more split I am about the whole idea. Part of me think that it's adding too much to our plates, part of me thinks it's the best idea ever, and a third part thinks it's a great idea as long as I don't take outside money to do it. Right now I could easily scale back my expansion ideas, pay off the loan on my C46, and fly it 5 hours a month to keep the Golden Eagle Network alive indefinitely. But considering how little traffic it gets I wonder if that's the best use of my FSE (and personal) time, if I can do something else with those hours that helps the community more I'd rather do that. There are a lot of ways this can go so KS and I need to chat to figure it all out.
I know this is a bit of backtracking, but the poll was really meant as a basic survey for an idea that may or may not happen months down the road. I don't know how it got to people sending me money and offering to pull strings to help PE members out (which I am grateful for
) and honestly that sudden snowball (which indicates a great community by the way) scares me a bit. There's a lot of good will out there (another sign of a great community) and we don't want to hurt that in any way. If we get to a point where the only missing piece is capital then we will engage with the community regarding that. In the interim if people have ideas we are always willing to listen.That's it for me for the time being. I'll answer any FSE questions, but don't expect to hear anything on FSE service expansion for a while.
Part of the fun is supposed to be trying new fields and new combinations of segments. If it becomes to over-engineered or too heavily automated, I believe the fun factor will go away and you'll soon be 'flying a bus', doing the same routes on a routine basis, just chasing the money.