Does a leaseback actually pay?
Put the airplane on a school’s line and the cheques cover the payment, goes the pitch. Sometimes that is true. This works out what it does to the cost of your own flying — which is the question you are really asking.
Measured as an investment, most leasebacks look poor — the return on capital is thin and the risk sits in one depreciating asset that strangers fly. But almost nobody does it as an investment. They do it to make owning an airplane affordable, and that is a different sum with a different answer.
So the headline below is not revenue. It is what an hour in your own airplane ends up costing you, next to what renting the same airplane would have cost.
100-hour inspections
An owner flying 90 hours a year sees one inspection: the annual. Put that airplane on a school’s line at 400 hours and it needs four 100-hour inspections as well — every year, for as long as the arrangement lasts. They do not replace the annual, they sit on top of it.
That single line is usually larger than the jump in insurance, and it is the one nobody puts in the spreadsheet before signing. The engine reserve does something similar and quieter: the rate per hour does not change, but you arrive at overhaul in four years rather than twenty, which turns a distant abstraction into a real bill on a real date.
The part that is a legal question
A wet lease provides the aircraft and at least one crewmember, and the lessor normally keeps operational control. A dry lease provides the aircraft alone, and the lessee takes operational control — the authority over starting, conducting and ending the flight.
Which one you have is not a labelling choice. It decides whether the operation sits under Part 91 or needs a Part 135 certificate, and an arrangement that is called a dry lease while the owner still arranges the crew and controls the flights is the classic shape of an illegal charter. The FAA has been paying more attention to this, not less.
One widely repeated claim is worth correcting, because it sends light aircraft owners down a rabbit hole. The truth-in-leasing requirements in 14 CFR 91.23 — the written lease clause, the copy mailed to the FAA Aircraft Registration Branch in Oklahoma City within 24 hours, the notification to the nearest FSDO at least 48 hours before the first flight, the copy carried in the aircraft — apply to large civil aircraft, over 12,500 pounds maximum certificated takeoff weight. A 172 or a Bonanza on leaseback is not subject to them.
The operational-control question still applies at every weight. It is just a different question from the filing requirements, and conflating the two is how owners end up either filing paperwork nobody wanted or, worse, assuming that because no filing was needed nothing else was either.