As a badly burned leaseback owner, let me drop a couple of 'hindsight
lessons' on you. Take them for what they're worth, only you know all
the pros and cons of the situation in question:

1- Insurance. Be ready for 5-8 Times conventional single-user costs
for lesser coverage. When I was on leaseback, insurance ran me 4500/
annually. As a single use scenario, I pay 725/annually for the same
plane with better coverage.
2- Maintenance. Forget the obvious (Annuals every 100 hours rather
than every year), Students, especially primary students, are very hard
on airplanes, and no amount of wishful thinking will fix that.
Engines start with electrics on, landing gear takes a special kind of
beating, brakes get dragged for long taxis. As a sole owner, you
quickly learn your bird, you have pride in her and you take care of
her. In my experience, students, even the most respectful ones,
didn't, or didn't know how (I do hold a certain culpability with the
Instructors, but understand as they are in and out of multiple planes
a day, they're understandably detached from the specific aircraft that
they're flying at the moment- and, frankly, a certain amount of
'excessive structural wear' is just a part of letting a student take
the controls for his first landing. Bringing me to
3- Headache - If you want your bird to fly, you need to be on top of
her. That means being ready to run down the the airport on a bi-
weekly (or better yet, daily) basis to notice and handle any
perspective MX (and/or cosmetic) issues. This means making good
friends with the local repair shop so he can get your inevitable MX
nightmares turned around ASAP. If there is one thing that will drive
a Black Business model into the red in a _REAL_ hurry, its letting
your bird get any type of rap as a hangar queen. Even a week of
downtime will have serious reprecussions over her utilization over the
next month or two. Beyond that, be prepared to play second fiddle for
flying time rights even in your own plane. Much like MX, there's no
quicker way to **** off students then to make your aircraft
unavailable on 'peak flying days' just so you, the owner, can go out
and enjoy a nice saturday 100$ burger.

I don't mean to be such a negative nancy on this... FWIW, I was
leasing back a PA-28-140, so my costs were somewhat higher than a
C150. In any case, I took all of the advice on here- I did the math,
I had a plan. I thought I knew what I was doing, and I still got
burned.

All I can say is you need to prepare not only for the financial
outlay, but the emotional/physical/attention outlay as well. For me,
it was far more effort than it was ever worth.

Consider yourself warned by a bitter fool

-Scott

On Jul 8, 1:41*pm, gatt wrote:
The owner of FBO was a family member's partner on the police force, is a
retired Marine, former mayor, retired sheriff, city commissioner, owns a
successful FBO and the fuel operation. *Did my IFR, Commercial and will
have finished my CFI with him very soon. *His integrity and honesty are
unimpeachable.

Right now he only has one C-152 in the fleet because the previous owner
with a leaseback arrangement sold out for a larger aircraft. *So there
are four IFR 172s, and Arrow, a 182 and a 310, but only one primary
trainer. *There are a number of CFIs who are keeping busy enough that in
the summer you have to book the airplane out a week in advance, so
there's no shortage of work, and I will be working out of there as an
independent instructor as soon as possible.

Prospective students are heading over to the more expensive "academy"
because they have 152s available, but the training and rental fees are
ridiculous. Seems like a leaseback on a 152 would be a win-win situation
given that my family has known and respected him since shortly after
World War II. *He did most of my ground school gratis--does that for
most--and except for a flat $100/mo. fee, the instructors keep 100% of
the hourly instruction rate.

I hear all kinds of horror stories about leasebacks, but this seems like
a much better than average prospect but I want to make sure I know what
I'm doing before I get into something like that.

Comments/experience?

Thanks in advance!

-c