6 Things That SHOCKED Me Buying an Airplane (Cessna 182)

before i bought my very first airplane i thought i had considered everything i'm such an overly analytical person that i thought between my financial model and all the people i was talking to that i had left no stone uh unturned overturned no stone unturned anyways four years into airplane ownership now i can say it's true that sometimes you just don't know what you don't know so four years in here are six main surprises i had after i bought my first cessna 182. number six is finding hanger space if you're gonna buy an airplane you gotta put it somewhere right and i thought this was gonna be super easy just like finding a storage unit or a garage somewhere and that turns out to be completely the opposite and at least here in texas and particularly north texas man hangar space is just really really hard to come by i ended up finding a hangar at addison texas which i love being based there super fun i tried never to buy fuel there because it's a rip-off but i got one of the last remaining two hangers there and i pay way too much every month for it but if you're gonna spend all the time energy effort and money to buy an airplane you gotta also put in the money to find it a place to sleep at night so finding hanger space was actually pretty tough i was able to find some but if you're considering buying an airplane go ahead and start looking at hanger space sometimes there's these crazy long wait lists for people to get in and unfortunately sometimes people don't even own airplanes anymore in their hangar space and they've just got all their crap put in it and the people managing the hangers don't actually enforce the fact that hey there needs to be an airplane in here it can't just be your rv or a bunch of boxes or old dirty furniture or something but anyways i was really surprised that hangar space is actually pretty hard to find the number five thing i was surprised about was how much tiny little airplane components that should not be expensive how expensive they can be oh my goodness you want to replace the you know little fairings uh wheel fairings or rear wheel pants or something on your airplane or you want to replace a light or a certain seat rail or something don't just think hey whatever it costs to put in cars is going to be the same amount of cost to put in my airplane that is wrong and the government is to thank for that i think for having all these companies having to go through all the faa approval process for having their components be certified to be put into airplanes and that's a long drawn out expensive process so you as the customer end up paying for all of that r d and approval process so things that i thought were just going to be super simple to replace either because i wanted to replace it or it broke and it needed replacement man the weirdest things just ended up being the most expensive things the number four surprise is that you are paying for the sins of the previous owner the sins they committed against that airplane if they just had cheap fixes for things or they decided not to fix things obviously your pre-buy inspection can try to uncover as much as possible about this and you can look through their log books etc etc but inevitably when you buy a used airplane you are going to find things that the previous owner just decided not to keep up with or they went cheap on etc etc i actually have had a pretty good experience the the gentleman who owned the airplane before me did a really good job of keeping it up but still you find things that maybe they just didn't catch right or they should have or um that sort of thing and so as much as you can you gotta try to vet the owner and the ownership experience of the airplane that you are purchasing because you are going to be paying for it as soon as it comes under your ownership and that's something you've got to pay attention to you're going to pay for whatever the previous owner did or didn't do number three and this one isn't as much financial as it is just logistical is that i was really surprised by how much i flew by myself you know when you buy your airplane you're really trying to kind of forecast what your average mission is going to be and we'll cover this in another video because some pilots gave me this advice and it helped me a ton when you're trying to decide what kind of airplane you need you really have to boil it down to what your average mission is going to be how many people are going to be carrying how fast do i really need to go how much do i need to carry what's my budget what are my flying ifr or vfr needs that sort of thing and so at least for my first airplane i didn't really know what my average mission was because i didn't have one yet and so i thought a pretty good percentage of my time i was going to be loading up a bunch of my friends or loading up the wife and the dog and going here and going there and all that stuff and really when i go back and total it up to my logbook if i did it i bet that 95 plus percent of the time i am just by myself it's not a bad thing it's just good to know so when you're looking at maybe the next airplane or or what to get you know i was surprised like hey most of the time it's just me cruising around up there unless we're going somewhere with my wife or we have a particular destination just joy rides it's usually just me the number two thing i was most surprised about in airplane ownership is kind of this shift of when you're paying for flying so what i mean by that is if you've ever rented an airplane right as soon as the prop stops spinning and you're done renting that airplane you get a bill or your credit card is charged or money's coming out of your account right and so you can go fly for two hours and then all of a sudden there goes 350 bucks and um one of the downsides of that is that you're kind of equating huh okay i just spent 350 bucks in two hours that's a pretty quick burn rate and so you're kind of immediately comparing the two was that sunset i just witnessed worth 350 bucks a lot of times the answer is yes sometimes if money's more tight maybe the answer is no and then you stop flying for a little while and so it can be kind of a there's pros and cons to that but in airplane ownership i noticed this monumental shift to um any time i'm using the airplane it feels like i'm not really paying for it i mean other than like getting gas or something but when the prop stops spinning on the on the ground hopefully and you push the airplane back into that hangar that was super hard to find um you don't get a bill you get to go on with your night have a good time um it's not like renting you don't you know get a credit card bill and it feels really fun but then the opposite is also true that when it seems like the most you're not flying is when you get all the bills and so you know the weather might be really bad for a month and that happens to be the same you know a few weeks or days or whatever that the airplane's an annual right and so you didn't get to fly any and then you're getting all these bills for the maintenance on the airplane that you weren't able to fly you're thinking huh well i didn't get to do much flying and i've got a few thousand dollars worth of bills and so you're kind of like well what am i paying for um but it's just kind of a shift and and all in i've kind of tended to enjoy that because as soon as you know i'm done with the flight i'm not putting a price tag immediately to it you know yeah there's a lot of times i'm not flying that i'm paying for it but i've kind of enjoyed that shift i think it's more enjoyable than renting now you can obviously end up paying way more than you need to for flying if you don't keep track of this but actually i intentionally have not kept track of exactly how much it cost me hour by hour to fly the airplane i know a lot of people do that nothing wrong with doing that certainly but i know that as long as i'm flying at least 100 hours a year or more that it is cheaper for me to own the airplane rather than to rent it and i stopped there intentionally now i'm not saying that's what you should do because a lot of people like to end up getting down to the penny what it cost them last year to fly but the reason i don't is because as long as i'm living within my means i'm not upside down financially meaning i am paying for more than i can actually afford to me it kind of came down to a fundamental decision that as long as i can afford this this is where i want to be spending my time energy and effort everybody has that some people you know like golfing or some people have other expensive hobbies and things but for me as long as i'm living within my means i want to be pursuing aviation so as long as i'm flying at least 100 hours a year i know that it's cheaper than renting and i'm great with that i don't want to know that hey it was 134.82 cents per hour last year for me to fly i don't want to do that because then every time i go fly if i'm going to go fly for an hour to watch the sunset then i'm back into that same situation i was in when i was renting which is all right was that sunset worth 134.82 for the hour it took me i don't want to think about it that way because again for me flying is about what i want to pursue it's how i want to spend my time it's how i want to spend my money and as long as i'm still stable financially and i'm okay with it and uh and i'd rather own the airplane than rent it and before we cover the most surprising thing about airplane ownership just want to ask you right now if you're not subscribed would you please subscribe to this channel 90 plus percent of you watching this right now are not subscribed and i really wish you would it takes a ton of effort to edit all these videos plan them out hook up gopros i'm going flying everything i love doing it but it's a ton of work so the more subscribers we have the more i'm going to be able to devote to this but more than anything i think you're going to love it if you subscribe you'll never miss a video and i promise i got a lot of really awesome stuff planned that you're not going to want to miss so definitely hit subscribe and the number one thing i've been the most surprised by in airplane ownership is how much it's been worth it i really thought i was going to analyze the heck out of it and be like i don't really know if this is worth it or it's costing me too much money and i really thought i'd be a little bit more um kind of on the fence about like yeah this is worth it it's really expensive and you know i for me the amount of joy and of uh kind of peaceful adventure that i get out of getting to go fly the airplane on a saturday morning or a long weekend or going to arkansas or going up to idaho that it's i i really can't put a price tag on it i can't explain to you the amount of personal satisfaction and gratification it has brought me to know that with a good amount of my time energy and money and effort i'm getting to go pursue aviation and that i live in a relatively short period of human history that this is even possible i take a lot of pride in that and a lot of gratitude honestly that i get to be among the last you know 120 years in which flight has even been possible and i could go on and on and on about this but i've been most surprised that it has always been worth it i've never looked back i've never regretted it every dollar i've spent on it every hour i've spent on it it's always been worth it so if you're considering buying an airplane or renting an airplane or becoming a pilot or doing that for your career i cannot encourage you enough to pursue aviation it has changed my life and i think it will change yours also so that has always been worth it to me for airplane ownership and it surprised me i already loved aviation but it surprised me even more once i owned an airplane how much i just enjoyed aviation as a whole so as much fun as it is here to sit here and talk about flying it's way more fun to actually go do the flying so that's what we're gonna go do some of that i'll be filming so definitely hit subscribe so you won't miss any of the future content and i can't wait to see you guys in the next video

Channel: Airplane Academy

Views: 535,674

Rating: 4.9090309 out of 5

Keywords: cessna 182, cessna, airplane, pilot, pilots license, airplane ownership, aircraft, aviation, aviator, cessna 172

Id: BxAlnPDi-xs

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020