Own or lease? What is more profitable?

What is more profitable, owning a plane or leasing a plane, which produces more profit if all conditions are the same?

Owning a plane makes more profit. BUT - you should not buy planes as long as you have so much money that you don’t know what to do with it.
Leasing is the better option as you can switch to newer planes whenever you want to.

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Depends on the conditions :wink:

Calculations in AS are fairly easy as (sadly) lease and purchase prices are tied to each other.
So all you need is to be sure about those conditions (of your enterprise)
Do you plan to grow and expand, or are you at a point where your bank account is growing faster than what you could spend on new airframe’s deposits?

A few factors for calculations:
Leasing is 5% deposit of the list price/aircrat trader price, lease rates are 0.5%

Weekly costs (actual depreciation) for purchased airframes are calculated as follows:
Minimum guaranteed resale value is 50% of the depreciated list price at time of sale. Depreciation (AS standard!) is 24a.
Costs per week (actual depreciation): [purchase price - resale value] / weeks of operation

Example: A320neo light, new at 60m$, operated for 130 weeks (roundabout 2,5a) scores a guaranteed resale of roundabout 26.9m$, which leaves you with weekly costs of not more than 254,600$. Leasing for the same airframe would be 300,000$.

But the deciding point are the conditions. Do you have those 60m$ to purchase or would you much rather spend them on 20 leased airframes?

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Btw, loan purchases can be an interesting alternative since the financing system was changed some time ago.

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