AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - May 2021 - 93

P&E 

SAVVY MAINTENANCE
Savvy Maintenance coverage
sponsored by AIRCRAFT SPRUCE

OPINION

|

What airplane
should I buy?
Thoughts on finding a good purchase candidate
BY MIKE BUSCH

AN EXTRAORDINARY NUMBER of GA airplanes were bought and sold in 2020. I
imagine this was somehow related to the
pandemic, although I'm not sure exactly
how. What I do know is that my company
had been averaging about 10 prebuys per
month in 2019, but by the summer of 2020
we were doing 50 prebuys per month. As I
write this partway into 2021, the rate has
gradually dropped back to about 30 per
month, which is still much higher than it
used to be.
A significant number of these are firsttime airplane buyers. They go online
to sites like Aircraft Shopper Online,
Controller, and Trade-A-Plane and are
confronted with an overwhelming number of possible purchase candidates.
Many come to me asking for help in how
to narrow the field down to a few. Single

or twin? Retractable or fixed gear? High
wing or low wing? High-time or low-time
engine or airframe?
WHAT'S YOUR MISSION?

When I'm approached for advice by a
prospective buyer, my first question is
generally, " How do you plan to use this
airplane-what's your typical mission? "
Is the aircraft going to be used primarily for recreation and $100 hamburgers,
or for serious cross-country travel in serious instrument weather? How often will
you be traveling more than 500 miles from
home base? Will you be flying mostly solo
or carrying your family? If the latter, how
big is the family, what do they weigh, and
how much luggage will they be bringing?
Most first-time buyers seem to start
looking for more airplane than they need.

They'll find an older Mooney or Cessna
210 that seems like a lot of airplane for the
money. They'll notice that many piston
twins are being offered for sale at lower
prices than high-performance piston singles and be tempted to buy a twin.
I always try my best to talk first-time
buyers out of doing that. The purchase
price of an older airplane is just a small
down payment on the total cost of ownership. The maintenance cost of an older
twin or high-performance retractable
can quickly get out of hand. Insurance
can range from expensive to unobtainable. Not to mention that first-time buyers
are bound to make a lot of mistakes while
they're learning the ropes of aircraft
ownership, and the cost of tuition is a lot
higher for a complicated airplane than it
is for a simpler one.
For all those reasons, I usually try to
steer first-timers toward a fixed-gear single-engine airplane, with the thought
that they can upgrade to something more
complex and capable after they've gained
a few years of ownership experience. For
recreational use, something like a Cessna
Skyhawk or Piper Archer is a good choice.
For serious IFR travel, a Cessna Skylane
or Piper Dakota or, if budget permits, an
older Cirrus SR22 can be a good choice.
When I first took the leap into aircraft ownership more than 50 year ago,
my first airplane was a Skylane. I flew it
for four years (including several transcontinental trips); then upgraded to
a higher-performance retractable, a
Bellanca Super Viking; and then years
later I upgraded again to a turbocharged
twin, a Cessna T310R. Looking back, I
think that was a pretty reasonable ownership trajectory.
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AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - May 2021

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