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Brian Jacobson |
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| About the Author ... |
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Brian Jacobson has over 12,000 hours
in all types of general aviation aircraft from trainers to jets. He has been
flying since 1970, and earned most of his certificates and ratings on the East
Coast in the early 1970s.
His first aviation employment was as sales manager at Air Worcester, Inc.,
an FBO in Massachusetts. Through the years, he worked for several FBOs selling
airplanes and flying charters. For nine years, he was chief pilot for a division
of ITT based in Providence, Rhode Island, and later was a bizjet captain for
Textron, Inc., out of Providence, Augusta, Georgia., and Pontiac, Michigan.
During those years, he flew real-world IFR in all sorts of weather and some of
the most congested airspace in the world.
Since 1988, Jacobson has been a member of
the National Aircraft Appraisers Association, and owns and operates a firm
called Great Lakes Aircraft Appraisal, appraising airplanes for buyers, sellers
and financial institutions. He also helps individuals and businesses buy
aircraft by evaluating their needs, recommending the type of aircraft they
should purchase, and helping them locate and procure those aircraft.
Jacobson is also a professional aviation writer. He is a contributing
editor for AVweb, Aviation Safety, and IFR
Refresher; a contributor to Plane &
Pilot; and can be heard on Belvoir Publications' Pilot Audio
Update.
In October 1996, he published his first book, Flying on the
Gages, in which he discusses his experiences flying IFR. In May, 1997, his
second book was published: Purchasing & Evaluating Airplanes. His books are available from Odyssey Aviation Publications.
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At my home airport, there is
always a copy of Trade-A-Plane sitting on the table in the
lobby of the terminal building. The airport manager marks it "Lobby Copy — Do not
remove." That single copy is probably the most widely read of all the periodicals
(and there are many) that are left for the reading pleasure of those who come through our
airport.
On the weekends it is passed around from pilot to pilot, and very often one will ask
another what they think of a particular airplane that is listed in the For Sale columns
for some aircraft make and model or another.
"Let me see it," one will say, and the paper goes to yet another pilot who
will read the ad and offer his opinion of whether the airplane is priced high, low, or
just right. Every now and then you'll hear, "Jim, this one's a steal…you'd
better jump right on it!"
If you listen to these guys long enough, it becomes apparent that most of them are
looking for bargain airplanes. Like many other people in the market today, they want to
find an airplane that has low total airframe time, a recent major overhaul, fresh radio
package, and a recent annual. If the price in the ad seems to be somewhat below the going
market value of similar airplanes, that gets their attention right away.
To some people, buying an airplane is a game. But that game can go wrong very quickly
after a bargain airplane is purchased if steps are not taken to insure that the airplane
is really worth the money you are paying for it. Making a successful purchase is hard work
and takes a lot of diligence and homework. The pursuit of the bargain airplane must be
made in conjunction with the search for other airplanes of the same type. How else will
you know that you are getting a bargain? An ad in T-A-P is not proof that an airplane is a
bargain.
The case of the "stolen" Cessna 310
Many years ago, I knew a fellow who decided to buy a Cessna 310
for personal use. I don't know how or where he found the one he bought, but it was only
two years old, had a great paint job, and the hour meter had recorded less than 100 hours
total time on the airframe and engines. He bragged about buying it for pennies on the
dollar, and at first we all thought he had "stolen" a good airplane. But as it
turned out, that was hardly the case.
Shortly after the great purchase was made, he decided to lease the Cessna 310 back to
the FBO I worked for to be used as a backup in the charter operation. As our director of
maintenance developed the necessary information to get it added to our Part 135
Certificate, the whole story behind the airplane came out.
The airplane had been involved in an accident when it had only 38 hours on it.
Apparently the owner, a low time pilot who bought the 310 brand new, ran it off a short
runway into a drainage ditch. For some reason the insurance adjuster could not get to the
site for two weeks, and ordered the airplane to be left in the ditch where it was
sitting...despite the fact that the ditch was full of water!
The adjuster finally arrived at the accident site and declared the aircraft to be a
total loss. Subsequently, an enterprising outfit bought it as salvage and repaired it.
They put a sharp-looking fresh paint job on it, and sold it to our local bargain hunter.
That's when the problems began.
What's wrong with this picture?
I got to fly the airplane on several charters, and never liked the feel of it. It did
not fly at all like our other (never damaged) Cessna 310. And although it was well
equipped with a slaved HSI and King avionics (instead of the usual Cessna radio package),
we could never seem to get all the radios working at the same time.
Once I flew the airplane up to the radio shop because neither VOR receiver was working.
The shop manager grimaced when he saw which airplane I had brought him. The reason for his
displeasure was evident when he pulled the nav/coms out to work on them. The corrosion
inside the radios was so bad that it is a miracle they worked at all.
The HSI failed on three different occasions while flying that airplane IFR, and I had
to get no-gyro vectors from ATC until I was out of the clouds. After each incident the
airplane went to the radio shop, but the problem kept recurring. Much later, it was
discovered that the rear window leaked when the airplane was flown in rain, and the gyro
was mounted on a shelf below and behind that window.
Finally, the airplane was taken off our charter certificate and returned to its owner,
because we were spending too much time trying to get it fixed and not enough time flying
revenue flights with it. The owner tried to sell the airplane but no one would buy it. It
had been for sale for almost two years with no takers when it met its end in Cape Cod Bay.
The owner was flying out to Provincetown, on the end of the Cape, when he reported a
double engine failure. He ditched the 310 in the water, and got out before it sank. The
Coast Guard picked him up.
The insurance company tried to raise the wreckage of the airplane but never located it.
Without the wreckage there was no way to be sure what really happened. The investigation
centered around the fuel system and the amount of fuel that was on the airplane. Our line
crew had topped the main tanks before the owner took off. There was plenty of fuel aboard.
The ditching occurred about 20 minutes after the aircraft left the airport.
Be sure what you're buying
Does that one experience mean that any bargain
airplane you buy is going to be a "hangar queen?" Of course not, but whenever
you locate an airplane that is priced well below the going market value on similar
aircraft, you must take steps to be certain that you are getting your money's worth. An
extensive prepurchase inspection is imperative, and it should
include a thorough search through the aircraft's records to determine if the airplane has
been damaged in the past.
The aircraft's total time in service (TTIS) should be verified during the log book
research. I have had several owners tell me their aircraft were very low-time machines,
only to find out they were simply reading the tachometer or Hobbs meter instead of
tallying the time flown when other tachometers, since replaced, were installed. One
airplane I appraised had 1,861 hours recorded on the tach, but when I looked through the
logs I found it had been flown over 4,000 hours. When confronted its owner said he never
looked at the logs.
An experienced buyer can usually tell that a 4,000-hour airplane doesn't look like an
1,800-hour one, and that was certainly the case with this one. But an old hog can be
dressed up with new paint and interior to look like a low-time beauty, and if you are not
paying attention you could wind up owning an airplane that you never would have purchased
had you known the truth about it.
The status of the engine(s) can have a major impact on the value of an aircraft, and
that's doubly true of a twin-engine airplane. Some people will claim the engines have been
freshly major-overhauled, when in truth the engines were simply taken apart, cleaned up,
reassembled and repainted. This practice is sometimes referred to as a "dip and ship
overhaul," and it has stung many an unwary purchaser.
The case of the "dip-and-ship" Aerostar
The worst case of this kind I have ever run across involved an Aerostar that had been
sitting unflown for a couple of years. Someone had removed the engines from the aircraft
and disassembled them. The owner of the aircraft decided he wanted to sell the airplane,
so he contracted with a friend who had an A&P certificate to complete the overhauls,
reinstall the engines, and perform an annual inspection so that the airplane was legal to
fly. According to a witness, all this work was accomplished over a three-day period.
The owner did not even test-fly the airplane. He had a buyer for it in Florida, so he
took off on the first flight after the work was done, intending to fly the Aerostar all
the way to its new home. He did not get very far.
Shortly after takeoff from Fort Smith, Arkansas, the
pilot contacted the local radar controller for radar service out of the local area. A few
minutes later the controller noticed a low altitude alert for the aircraft and asked the
pilot if he was going to climb. The pilot stated that he was planning on climbing higher.
But as the controller was terminating radar service, he noticed that the aircraft's
altitude was still fluctuating between 1,400 and 1,500 feet.
It was then that the pilot advised that he had to return to Fort Smith. He told the
controller that he had shut down the right engine because it was leaking oil. The
aircraft's altitude continued to deteriorate and the airplane crashed into a small group
of trees just a few miles short of the runway.
Investigators found many discrepancies in the engines. No O-rings had been installed in
any of the induction pipes on the left engine. Metal contamination was noted in the oil
when the rocker box covers were removed. Exhaust system flange nuts were missing for
several of the cylinders, and metal contamination was found in the oil filter. The right
engine's exhaust system was missing the hold down nuts for the #3 and #4 cylinders, metal
shavings and filings were found in all the rocker box covers, no O-rings were installed in
any of the induction system intake pipes, lint was found in the injector nozzles, the
engine driven oil pump was contaminated with metal filings, the oil pump drive gear shaft
was worn, holes were found in the #5 and #6 pistons, and evidence of detonation was found
in all the cylinders.
Had the pilot succeeded in reaching his Florida destination, would the buyer have found
the problems with the engines? Perhaps, if he had a thorough prepurchase inspection done.
But we don't know if the buyer was planning to do one or not. After all, the airplane had
"freshly overhauled engines" and was "just out of annual."
All logbook entries are not created equal
Just because the logbooks say an engine has had a fresh major overhaul, that doesn't
necessarily make it so. If the overhaul was done correctly and logged correctly, there
should be an entry detailing exactly what was done to the engine, what new parts were
used, what parts were reconditioned, whether the engine was rebuilt to "new
limits" or "service limits," and whether any of the pistons, cylinders or
other components were undersize or oversize.
Some mechanics write down every last detail of what
was done in the logbooks, while other mechanics seem to be afraid their pen will run out
of ink. The engine overhaul entry for my Arrow's Lycoming engine is four handwritten pages
long. Everything is accounted for including what outside vendors provided services such as
overhauling the case and certifying the crankshaft and other parts. The mechanic carefully
noted the total times on every accessory whether he overhauled them or not.
But even an entry like that doesn't mean that you can skip the prepurchase inspection.
There still could be major problems that only an inspection will reveal. Recently a
compression test on a low time Continental O-470 revealed very low compression in three of
the six cylinders. I would not have expected to see that on a 200-hour engine that was
overhauled in a well known shop, but there it was. If I had bought that airplane based
solely on the reputation of the shop and the entry in the logs I would have lost several
thousand dollars (the cost of reworking or replacing those cylinders).
"Low time, no damage history"
Most sellers know what their airplane is worth. If they have intentionally priced their
airplane below the apparent market value, there has to be a reason for it. Often that
reason is high time and/or damage history, and sellers sometimes try to conceal such
liabilities.
As our fleet ages, more time is put on the airframe
and engines. There are 10,000-hour Cessna 172s still flying, while those with less than
1,000 hours are becoming as scarce as a lunar landing module that made the round-trip to
the moon. It is very difficult to sell a light single today if it has more than 5,000
hours on the airframe...and if the aircraft is sparsely equipped, it's practically
impossible. On the other hand, it is very easy for a seller to "lose" some or
all of the logbooks on an airplane like that to cover up its total time in service.
Damage history can also make an airplane tough to sell. When I first started buying and
selling airplanes in the early 1970s, it was nearly impossible to sell a damaged airplane
because there were too many low-time machines around that had not been damaged. That is no
longer true. Certain types of damage (such as a gear-up landing) are acceptable providing
the repairs have been done correctly. But even properly-repaired structural damage will
reduce the market value of the aircraft, and an airplane that has been "totaled"
and rebuilt from pieces of two or more wrecks is unappealing to most buyers. Sometimes,
damage of this magnitude is covered up by removing entries from logbooks or not making
them in the first place. If the buyer doesn't know how to recognize the telltale signs of
repaired damage on the airplane itself, he or she could be badly stung.
Every buyer should do a title search, and should ask the title company to obtain copies
of any FAA Form 337s that have been filed for that airplane. Mechanics are required to
fill out and submit this form any time they make any "major repairs or
alterations" to any certified airplane. A copy of each Form 337 is supposed to kept
with the maintenance logs and be passed along with the airplane, but often they are lost.
It's easy for a seller to "lose" a 337 that will reduce the market value of the
aircraft by several thousand dollars, especially if he or she bought the airplane without
realizing it had been damaged. The seller isn't always to blame, either...some mechanics
do not make logbook entries for major repairs when they complete a Form 337.
If the title search turns up Form 337s that reveal damage that you were not informed
about, you should confront the owner of the airplane. It's entirely possible that the
owner doesn't know about it, especially if he's not the first owner and failed to do a
prepurchase inspection or title search when he bought the airplane. If a Form 337 reveals
severe damage to the airplane, you probably will back out of the deal. However, minor
damage can be worked around with a price adjustment. It depends on exactly what occurred
and how the repairs were made.
While there are fewer bargains today than there were 20 years ago, some good airplanes
can still be bought at very reasonable prices. As a purchaser, your job is to make sure
that when you find an airplane that is priced below others of the same type in similar
condition and with similar equipment, you understand why the owner is selling below the
market. You have to do your homework quickly or someone else is likely to wind up with the
airplane...but not so quickly that you aren't completely satisfied that everything about
the aircraft is exactly as represented.
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