Offer on Hanger Queen Airplane

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evapilotaz

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I flew out to a remote airport and notice a Cessna 182 sitting on the Tarmac. This airplane was collecting dust with Spider webs all around. It looked to be in ok condition but needed a lot of clean up. I was sadden that this airplane wasn't flying for what ever reason. I was thinking about contacting the Owner making some low ball offer. First I would have an A & P mechanic check it out and give me an estimate $$$ to making it airworthy again. I'm not looking into aircraft ownership as I just got current again but this had me thinking.

Also It was sitting next to a Cherokee 6 collecting dust as well. :dunno:

Thoughts.
 
Have it checked out and if the price is right
 
The plane has been sitting for some time outside. No pre purchase inspection, get an annual.
 
RichNY said:
The plane has been sitting for some time outside. No pre purchase inspection, get an annual.
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No, you get a pre-purchase inspection that is converted to an annual if you buy the aircraft. The pre-purchase inspection should be more detailed than an annual anyway, especially if the aircraft has been sitting.

(Actually, it's not even a pre-purchase inspection, it's a pre-purchase evaluation).
 
At least you don't have to worry about the old slap a quick paint job on it and call it good like so many planes on the market.

I'd rather find a car or a plane covered with dust in a barn than be looking at a shiny new pig in a blanket.

Good luck.
 
What makes you think the owner wants to sell. Then there is your statement about making a low ball offer. Will you increase the offer if the plane does well on the pre purchase?
 
frfly172 said:
What makes you think the owner wants to sell. Then there is your statement about making a low ball offer. Will you increase the offer if the plane does well on the pre purchase?
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What could it hurt to ask? And if the owner accepts a low ball offer why should he pay more than he has to? If I saw the same plane there is a good chance I would do the same thing. But I am already looking for a good deal on a 182.
 
frfly172 said:
What makes you think the owner wants to sell. Then there is your statement about making a low ball offer. Will you increase the offer if the plane does well on the pre purchase?
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I don't know but as said by someone else it doesn't hurt to ask. I can make any offer I like and with a low ball offer I'm testing the water on how anxious this person wants to get rid of it.

There must be some reason its sitting there. Lost Medical, Lost Interest, Broken, not airworthy, cant afford it. Who knows.

Thanks.
 
You may very well find that it costs more to buy it and get it flying than simply buying a currently flying example to start with.

Go into it with a "worst case" estimate of costs (starting with potential engine replacement), and go from there. The cost of plane + refurbishment is sometimes more than new.

If you want a "rarer" breed, then it's probably worthwhile - if it's a common (172, 182) breed, it will rarely be a bargain.
 
Generally speaking, planes make bad 'sweat equity' investments unless you are an A&P with time to spare. Much of the work will need to be done by licensed A&P or by yourself under direct supervision. If this is what you can do, then go for it, but the key is to buy it at the right price. Low ball if you want, but stick to your price or you'll be upside down soon.
 
Ask. They can kill you but they can't eat you. All kidding aside, it might be sitting because the pilot in the family might have passed away or is unable to fly anymore and the family just isn't interested in it. Of course it could also be involved in some type of court case and might not ever fly again. But it all starts with asking. Just don't talk about money until you know what is all involved and how much work it might need.

I would suggest a letter first indicating interest. A cold contact offering pennies on the dollar is just flat rude.

I have an old truck in my yard and every now and then some idiot will yell over the fence that he will buy it for 100 bucks. Last guy that did that I threw rocks on him until he decided that rocks hurt or I wasn't selling and left. It is an old truck and needs work but I am not going to give it away. When people come with their hat in their hands and politely ask me about the truck and its future, I will talk to them but it still isn't for sale.
 
There's a lot of emotion in airplanes. Many owners are too poor to fix a problem but then too attached to let go.

For some reason, sending an old airplane to the scrap heap is mentally tougher than sending the old Buick there.
 
Unfortunately this scenario is all too common. Half the aircraft at our airport buy less than $500 of fuel per year. That's less than 20 hours of flight time. Several of our tenants bought NO FUEL last year. That's the sad state of affairs at many places. The big fear about a hangar queen is an irretrievably internally corroded engine.
 
A good deal on an airplane is getting a good airplane at a good price. A bad deal on an airplane is getting a bad airplane at a really good price! :D
Birds that have been sitting for a long time can be a fairly cheap fix up or a total nightmare, you may not find out what you've got until it's yours!
If it's got original avionics, you can spend as much as you want on the panel to bring it up to your standards. Figure the prop will need an overhaul that's $2-3K, how's the glass? Gyros have been sitting, they may fail sooner rather than later. Engine needs to really be examined, could be fine or a corroded mess.
Just make sure you understand the potential downside of buying a bargain. :D
I'd probably find out what the owner is thinking before I got a mechanic involved. Lots of airplanes are sitting because they USED to be worth a lot more and the owner won't sell for less than it was worth in 2005.:dunno:
 
OP it is the same deal as making a whore a wife. Be careful man you are already in love.
 
We have a few at our airport also. A C-150 and C-170 are sitting and rarely flown. Not sure why. The owners obviously don't enjoy flying as much as I do :).
 
evapilotaz said:
I flew out to a remote airport and notice a Cessna 182 sitting on the Tarmac. This airplane was collecting dust with Spider webs all around. It looked to be in ok condition but needed a lot of clean up. I was sadden that this airplane wasn't flying for what ever reason. I was thinking about contacting the Owner making some low ball offer. First I would have an A & P mechanic check it out and give me an estimate $$$ to making it airworthy again. I'm not looking into aircraft ownership as I just got current again but this had me thinking.

Also It was sitting next to a Cherokee 6 collecting dust as well. :dunno:

Thoughts.
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If it's sitting on Tarmac, it's likely been there a while and the airport has been closed for decades. :D
 
chemgeek said:
Unfortunately this scenario is all too common. Half the aircraft at our airport buy less than $500 of fuel per year. That's less than 20 hours of flight time. Several of our tenants bought NO FUEL last year. That's the sad state of affairs at many places. The big fear about a hangar queen is an irretrievably internally corroded engine.
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I do a good bit of long cross countries. Increasingly, the only other planes I hear with Center is airlines and an odd Lear, King Air, Challenger, etc. Very, very few smaller GA planes.

When I started in the 90s there were plenty of small planes talking to ATC. Sure doesn't seem to be any more.

Could mean few flying IFR or getting VFR flight following, but I doubt it....
 
Why make an offer on a hangar queen? For $10k you can usually have an aircraft in good condition and for $25k more, one in perfect condition.

Parts is Parts as Frank Perdue used to say, and thats why even trashed airplanes have value.
 
JOhnH said:
What could it hurt to ask? And if the owner accepts a low ball offer why should he pay more than he has to? If I saw the same plane there is a good chance I would do the same thing. But I am already looking for a good deal on a 182.
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Karma, that's why. This is not a hangar queen, it's a ramp queen. The two possible scenarios are the guy refuses a low ball offer and nothing happens. The other worse one is the guy accepts the offer and it becomes his airplane.
 
What kind of pilot says 'tarmac'?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Tapatalk
 
Ok maybe Tarmac is not the right word. Forgive me! It's sitting tied down outside at the ramp. Maybe I feel sad for the air plane just sitting there dying away.
 
evapilotaz said:
Ok thanks for the education. Glad we cleared that up. ;)
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It's worth getting it right, because tarmac is what uneducated news reporters call it right before they destroy an aviation story with more ignorance. Calling it tarmac will get you a weird look from the vast majority of pilots.
 
Tarmac is tar and macadam (crushed rock), an asphalt paving system still in use across America.
 
Out here in rural America we have a lot of oil and stone roads not exactly tarmac as I understand it but not a completely dissimilar surface.

The engine makes all the difference in the world. I have a friend that has a really nice looking well maintained Tri-Pacer unfortunately it is over TBO by a few hundred hours. Still has good compression and he is still flying it but before long will need a new engine. Well a new engine with cylinders is going to run 15-20K closer to the high end than the low. You can buy some pretty nice Tri-Pacers for 20-25K with low to mid time engines on Barnstormers. So what is the plane really worth?
 
DFH65 said:
The engine makes all the difference in the world. I have a friend that has a really nice looking well maintained Tri-Pacer unfortunately it is over TBO by a few hundred hours. Still has good compression and he is still flying it but before long will need a new engine. Well a new engine with cylinders is going to run 15-20K closer to the high end than the low. You can buy some pretty nice Tri-Pacers for 20-25K with low to mid time engines on Barnstormers. So what is the plane really worth?
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This is my argument about fixer uppers and ramp/hangar queens in general. They usually need lots of cosmetics and the cost to overhaul the engine is a huge % of the airplanes value. Realistically your friends Tri-Pacer has very little value, maybe $5-10K, but I bet he'd slap you if you offered him $5 grand!:D
His best option is probably to buy a used engine when his finally croaks. :dunno:
Buy and sell at mid-time. :D
 
N747JB said:
This is my argument about fixer uppers and ramp/hangar queens in general. They usually need lots of cosmetics and the cost to overhaul the engine is a huge % of the airplanes value. Realistically your friends Tri-Pacer has very little value, maybe $5-10K, but I bet he'd slap you if you offered him $5 grand!:D
His best option is probably to buy a used engine when his finally croaks. :dunno:
Buy and sell at mid-time. :D
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I am sure he would slap me too. He has another plane so he is just flying the tri-pacer less but that gets expensive when you have to annual it for a few hours a year.

I doubt he would go for it (and I don't have the money right now nor do I want to insult him) but it would be tempting to offer to buy in at half the cost of the new engine. Probably still get slapped but...:D

ETA: I am 48 he is probably mid 60s you start thinking that a new engine may take you past your flying years anyway flying a few hundred hours a year at most.
 
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This is sad. Airplanes become hanger Queens because the owner didn't have the funds to either fix a problem or Overhaul the engine. What a waste.
 
Yup, it happens every day with cars, boats, motorcycles, RV's and no one blinks an eye. Unless, it's a desirable model, nobody cares about a 69 Chevy wagon with wood grain, but a 69 Z28 brings out the buyers! :D
As pilots, most of us hate to see an airplane destroyed, either by an accident or neglect, but they ain't ours, so we just watch the neglect happen.
As others have stated, many owners are hoping to get their medical back, or maybe the grand kids will want to fly one day, or possibly they know the true value of their rare 1968 Cessna 172, and won't sell it for a penny less!!:rolleyes:

evapilotaz said:
This is sad. Airplanes become hanger Queens because the owner didn't have the funds to either fix a problem or Overhaul the engine. What a waste.
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evapilotaz said:
Ok Tarmac is the runway. Lol. I meant ramp.
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Not quite. As noted above, it is a paving material or method. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarmac for more information.

What it is NOT is a location on an airport. News reporters screw this one up with great regularity, furthering my distrust in anything they say relating to aviation.
 
txflyer said:
I'd rather find a car or a plane covered with dust in a barn than be looking at a shiny new pig in a blanket.
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I've seen barn airplanes. Not pretty outside or inside. Barns are for animals, including mice and birds and flies and who know what, and those beasts make a corroded mess inside any airplane. Guy I know got a Tri-Pacer that had been sitting; one mag had been removed for some reason, and mice had built nests inside the engine. What a mess. I bet the mag had failed, the guy took it off to get fixed and never got around to putting things back together again.

Currently working on a 39-year-old 180 with less than 1100 hours on it. On floats. Always hangared. Should be perfect, right? Fuel and oil hoses as hard as wood. Stainless aileron and elevator cables worn right out because the hangar was an open affair that let the wind through, and even with the control lock in the wind wiggles the surfaces and keeps those cables rubbing on fairleads and rub strips. 39 years of that eats stainless cables. Wheels and brakes are still brand-new, 14 hours ferry time on them, but the seals in the brake masters and calipers will be hard as rocks.

Airplanes rot whether they fly or not.

Dan
 
Ghery said:
Not quite. As noted above, it is a paving material or method. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarmac for more information.

What it is NOT is a location on an airport. News reporters screw this one up with great regularity, furthering my distrust in anything they say relating to aviation.
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I'm a pilot, and I frequently call it the tarmac. Funny thing is, your Wikipedia article says, "While the specific tarmac pavement is not common in some countries today, many people use the word to refer to generic paved areas at airports,[5] especially the apron near airport terminals despite the fact that these areas are often made of concrete." (citing the OED)

Lots of other references state that it's used colloquially for the apron area.

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2011/12/tarmac.html
 
Dan Thomas said:
I've seen barn airplanes. Not pretty outside or inside. Barns are for animals, including mice and birds and flies and who know what, and those beasts make a corroded mess inside any airplane. Guy I know got a Tri-Pacer that had been sitting; one mag had been removed for some reason, and mice had built nests inside the engine. What a mess. I bet the mag had failed, the guy took it off to get fixed and never got around to putting things back together again.

Currently working on a 39-year-old 180 with less than 1100 hours on it. On floats. Always hangared. Should be perfect, right? Fuel and oil hoses as hard as wood. Stainless aileron and elevator cables worn right out because the hangar was an open affair that let the wind through, and even with the control lock in the wind wiggles the surfaces and keeps those cables rubbing on fairleads and rub strips. 39 years of that eats stainless cables. Wheels and brakes are still brand-new, 14 hours ferry time on them, but the seals in the brake masters and calipers will be hard as rocks.

Airplanes rot whether they fly or not.

Dan
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If you're not game I'll through the guy an offer, PM me his details.
 
Lindberg said:
I'm a pilot, and I frequently call it the tarmac. Funny thing is, your Wikipedia article says, "While the specific tarmac pavement is not common in some countries today, many people use the word to refer to generic paved areas at airports,[5] especially the apron near airport terminals despite the fact that these areas are often made of concrete." (citing the OED)

Lots of other references state that it's used colloquially for the apron area.

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2011/12/tarmac.html
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That doesn't make it correct, however.
 
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