Buying a New Plane

by Philip Greenspun, ATP, CFII-MEI, CFI-H; updated March 2007

Buying a car is easy. All cars will get you door-to-door in the same amount of time. Most cars will hold enough people and bags for 99 percent of your trips. All cars have sufficient range to get you from gas station to gas station. You can trade a car in on a new and different car in an afternoon.

Airplanes are much more varied in their capabilities. An airplane without de-icing will be grounded on cloudy days through the entire winter. There is almost no airplane that can carry a full passenger and a full fuel load at the same time. A fancier airplane may require a longer runway than the one at the airport near your favored destination. The speed differences among planes, combined with expected headwinds, can result in a difference of hours or days in transit time. When it is time to trade in, it could take 6-12 months to sell a plane without offering a steep discount.

Start by defining the mission

It doesn't matter how advanced the technology is, how seductive the advertising is, or how persuasive the magazine article is. A plane is either capable of your typical mission or it is not. Until you've defined your mission, you can't see if a plane fits.

Sample Mission Definition

Here's a sample mission and capability definition:

range: would be very nice to make it with four people from Bedford, MA (BED) to Key West (EYW) non-stop, which is 1257 on the airways. A 1000 n.m. range with four people against an average headwind would be nice.
runway: we would like to be able to get into a 2500' runway with clear approaches, such as at KBID or in the Caribbean
certified for flight into known-ice
seating: minimum of six, including the two pilot seats in front.
interior noise: 88 dBA or quieter at the pilot seats and less than 86 dBA in the rear area
relief tube or lav
capable of climbing to a minimum of 25,000' (to get above icing layers) and pressurized for comfort
reliable power (the most reliable piston systems might be acceptable; turbine is preferable)
low capital cost; we expect to operate only about 300 hours per year, so it is more important to have a low acquisition price and therefore lower insurance than to have the lowest per-hour direct operating costs [$500,000 to $1.5 million would be an acceptable range]
instruments: if single-engine, some sort of electric backup attitude indicator; HSI
avionics: moving-map GPS, datalink weather (could possibly substitute a Garmin 496 for the datalink)
high-quality autopilot [possibly we would be willing to acquire an airplane with marginal avionics and autopilot, with a plan to replace everything with a Garmin G1000 and GFC 700 under an STC]
if multi-engine, autofeather
if turbine, free turbine rather than direct drive (we can't handle the maintenance requirements of a direct-drive engine and the lack of forgiveness for overtorque)

Specify a Trade-Off Procedure

Even if you have an unlimited budget, aviation is all about compromise. A Boeing Business Jet (converted 737) is a lovely airplane, but it can't land at small airports. You probably won't get everything on your list, so specify in advance a way of trading off one attribute for another. Example:

comfort and interior quiet are more important than speed
range is more important than speed (if it were not, we would get an Eclipse jet!)

List the Crew

What resources are available for flying the new airplane? If it is just a newly minted Private certificate holder, that limits the search to some fairly basic airplanes. Here's an example of a crew specification:

one member/owner (Greenspun) has ATP and MEI ratings and about 2200 hours total time, but only 110 hours of multi and 50 turbine, half of which was in helicopters
[if we end up with a multi-engine and/or turbine plane] until Greenspun is fully up to speed, we would hire an experienced turbine multi pilot (and MEI) for any IMC mission; Greenspun would probably take over as the captain after 100 hours or so

Discuss some Example Aircraft

To see if the mission profile is specific enough, prepare a written evaluation of some airplanes against the mission specification.

Examples:

A 1987 Piper Malibu with a 4-blade prop would handle all of our requirements... except that we don't trust its Continental IO-550 piston engine (better than the Lycoming in the Mirage, but perhaps not good enough) and the entire airplane seems a little bit too fragile (e.g., tough to get the landing gear down after flying in the cold flight levels).
King Air E90. Same fuel burn and cabin as a C90, but with an extra 90 gallons of fuel (474 gallons versus 384 for the C90). F90 is similar, but supposedly requires longer runways. We would require the Raisbeck modifications ($100,000) that give us a 400 lb. gross weight increase and also interior quiet due to four-bladed props. Typical fuel burn is 70 gallons/hour, so on a VFR day this means about 6 hours of fuel with a reserve. 6 hours x 240 knots = 1440 n.m. still air VFR range (checks with the Raisbeck Web site performance chart for the E90). Full-fuel payload is around 600 lbs. for a Raisbeck ship. Seats-full NBAA range for a factory ship is 730 n.m. Tanks-full NBAA range for a factory E90 is 1337 n.m. Balanced field length is 4350'.
TBM-700. Interior noise measures 91 dBA at the pilot's seat. Range is supposedly around 1400 n.m., but that is with only a pilot and 100 lbs. of bags. We need to find out what the range is with 600 lbs. of passengers. TBM-700 should be at least $800,000 more expensive than the E90. http://www.caijets.com/tbm_operating.php shows that the TBM is at least $300/hour cheaper to operate, which will save $90,000 per year if we run 300 hours/year. The extra $800,000 capital cost, however, will cost us about $50,000/year in opportunity cost on the money, plus we'll be paying more for insurance (?), and finally the TBM-700 will be depreciating faster.

Think about the Plane and Seller

Write down the kind of plane that you would be willing to buy and the kind of owner from whom you'd be willing to buy. If you're an A&P mechanic, maybe you'd be willing to buy a plane that has been rusting on the ramp for 5 years and whose flying condition is unknown. Whatever your standards, write them down before starting to go through the classified ads.

Here's an example specification:

an older plane is acceptable, but the current owner needs to be a big company or rich person with unlimited funds for maintenance who has spared no expense in keeping the plane ready to fly. The current owner should have flown at least 75 hours in the preceding year with a good dispatch rate.
we want engines that have been overhauled reasonably recently. If it is a piston, we would regard anything that is more than 10 years since overhaul as requiring an overhaul, regardless of hours. For turbine engines, we would want to come up with a similar rule of thumb.

Start Shopping

Where to look for a new plane? There are the obvious locations:

Bulletin boards at local airports
www.trade-a-plane.com — cheap planes; reasonably good helicopter section; subscription required
www.aso.com — good coverage of the complex piston market; free to browse
www.controller.com — comprehensive survey of expensive planes, but also a lot of cheap ones; free to browse

What is a non-obvious source of planes for sale? Write letters to the owners of planes that are not for sale. Aircraft registration is public information in the United States. Grab the FAA registration database, narrow it down to, say, 2003-5 Piper Meridians, and send all of those owners a letter saying "I would like to buy your plane." That's what airplane dealers do when they are asked to find a specific plane for a customer.

A variety of owners, CFIs, and ATPs will answer your question in the Aviation question and answer forum on this server.

philg@mit.edu