Buying airplane? Issues?

For me buying an airplane has two huge upsides:
1) I never have to fly in an airplane that someone has abused (putting it mildly) on their flight the last hour/day.
2) My trips are almost always weekend getaways. Taking an airplane for the weekend from most FBOs is a royal pain.

You can make all the financial arguments in the world, but there is nothing better than parking your car next to your plane, and 15 minutes later you are on your way.
 
andybean said:
You can make all the financial arguments in the world, but there is nothing better than parking your car next to your plane, and 15 minutes later you are on your way.
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And there's nothing worse than being told your annual inspection is going to cost $40,000.
 
alaskaflyer said:
Did you own a B-52 or some Sikorski CH-53 variant? Seems a bit much for an inspection.
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No, twasn't mine. But the inspection on a friend's turboprop revealed some work that had to be done to the compressor inlet, which was more than half of the total. The "regular" annual was still something like $18K.
 
Observing human nature is an interesting exercise. When a mechanic who is highly-skilled in a particular make/model discovers problems on a prebuy, the prospective buyer thinks he's a genius. When that same mechanic finds problems with the airplane during the first annual after the buyer closes the deal, the owner immediately assumes the mechanic is either (a) a crook whose goal is to steal him blind, or (b) a total inept who should have caught all those problems last year, even though they weren't there.

kmead said:
I've bought 2 airplanes so far and I've been in the middle of hundreds of purchases and sales by performing the pre-purchase. All I can say is make sure the airplane is as represented and get everything in writing. The pre-purchase inspection by someone knows the type is very important part of doing that. It's funny that people will buy the $500,000 aircraft (fresh annual) without any checks. No matter how good the aircraft is, you can expect some catching up as you begin to use the airplane.
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