Running a 135

[alaskadrifter]

Medallion is no big deal to get, to be honest, put in a little elbow grease and develop a risk assessment program and you've got the bare bones of Medallion - it's actually a good program if it's done right...if not it's just lipstick on a pig.

Latest rumor I heard is they are changing their SVFR requirements to 600 & 2.

 

[Richman]

Having gone through this a number of times, if you READ, and follow what the Feds want without too much interpretation on your part, the SP 135 is not a big a deal.

There are whole companies that specialize in this...you just buy their product off the shelf, and customize it for you local op and then drop it on the Feds. That can be spendy, but if you have reasonably competent writing and computer skills, it's not that big a deal to do it yourself. The trick is to meet with the Feds, and find out EXACTLY what they want/need. If DIY, it can be time intensive, but if you don't have anything else to do in your spare time, it's just like anything else requiring elbow grease.

It's when you get off the well worn path that it becomes an issue with the Feds. Back in the day, a bro an I tried to recertify our 141 school to use a homebrew syllabus. This was the day where you essentially had to take the Jeppesen package out of the shrink wrap and submit it to the Feds to do 141. Their program was fine, but there we thought we could do it better, and this was just the time when desktop publishing was starting to creep out of the nitch, so we could easily do all of our records and materials.

We did it, but it was a struggle the whole way, but we finally got it done. In the end, though, it wasn't maintainable because the people who had the knowledge of how our particular program worked, namely my bro and I, split, and no one else was willing to step up. Plus at the time, it required a fair amount of specialized computer skills to futz with Aldus Pagemaker (the distant relative of Adobe InDesign).

Richman

 

[Romulus]

I'll be honest, I think this is just what owners of 135 operators say to keep the competition at bay. Yeah, it's more work than say, working for Brand X 121 Airline...but almost every owner of a 135 I've known that had his or her niche and was way in debt to buy the business or airplanes was a lot more comfortable than any pilots I've ever seen, and typically seemed very fulfilled. The guys pulling their hair out bought the business on credit and were having to rob Peter to pay Paul. If you go into the business debt free and keep the overhead low, it doesn't seem to bad. Of course, to do this, you have to have a large sum of money sitting around to begin with...

One of the big problems with operating charter is that it is highly cash-flow intensive, and you typically pay for the service well before you get reimbursed for it. For example, I know that doing flying for Uncle Sam (which can a nice bit of money to fall back on) sometimes have as much as a 6 month time period between doing the charter and getting paid for it. So, if you do a bunch of BLM flying you might be super profitable on paper, but have to close the doors because you've hot no money in the bank to pay the pilots and keep the lights on. Similarly, even charter flying for companies might have a 30 day lead time on getting paid. Realistically, while it's harder to do right, scheduled flying is some of the "easiest" from a cashflow standpoint - unfortunately, providing excellent customer service requires massive overhead, substantial work, and sometimes you have to strategically lose money on a flight to not lose customers. You will work your ass off no matter how you do it, but the best advice I can give is to manage your cashflow, treat your customers right, and do things safely. In the long run, you won't have a business if you screw up any of those three.

The other thing to think about is your "return on capital investment." If you're only in it for the "money," you might be better served simply investing the $200k. Still for a lot of people (including myself) the allure of running my own shop is almost overpowering. For awhile, it's all I wanted to do, and one day, I likely will - just got to get out of student loan debt and get an airplane.

This right here. A guy I worked for at a place with 6 airplanes running a summer only 135 once told me he had to have about one million in cash on hand to be able to start the season. He had to buy fuel, insurance, payroll, airplane leases, and on and on all before the first dollar rolled in. We would start in April and the company wouldn't be making a profit until August/September. One year we had an airplane lose and engine and land in a swamp. No one hurt and the plane eventually flew again but that was enough financial strain that the business didn't make money that year. Imagine if you only had one airplane not 6. Thats alot of stress right there.

 

[Roger Roger]

Having been in 135 management for about 2 years I highly suggest that if you don't want to shorten your life due to stress, anxiety, and loss of sleep you avoid being anything other than a wage slave. A lot of this is of course personality dependent and if you're naturally a happy go lucky sort it might not be as much of a strain.