My EXPERIENCE with the $10,000 AIRPLANE!

well hello everyone this is brother Dee and once again the airplanes are still down for maintenance and it's another beautiful day so I'm here at the Pagan branch reservoir on the Gourley trail and I'm here to share about a recent experience I had are you someone who spends hours upon hours on your computer your device drooling over airplanes on trade plane Barnstormers or even Craigslist well today I want to tell about an experience I had with Craigslist so I recently drove 150 miles to go check out an airplane and it was a 1962 Cessna 150 B and it was listed on Craigslist for $10,000 well I've heard you got to be careful about purchasing anything on Craigslist but I thought it would be worth the drive to go and look at what might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or a once-in-a-lifetime deal well before I went I talked with the owner on the phone and so I knew at Foot that the plane had 1900 hours or more on the engine since major overhaul also knew that two of the cylinders had compressions in the low-60s the member should have been somewhere in the mid 70s according to a general rule of thumb but I've been reading some articles that say that that relates mainly to lycoming engines and that continental engines will run even with compressions in the mid-50s I've also been reading that airplanes can be pushed way past their tbo for their time before overhaul pilots will buy planes with really high time they'll fly them for a few hundred hours and then they'll sell them for basically the same price they paid for them and that way they get really low-cost flight hours so with this information in mind I thought I would at least go check it out I mean how can you go wrong with a ten thousand dollar airplane so when I arrived the guy let me look it over and afterwards I asked if we could take it out for a test flight and he said no we couldn't do that because he had recently lost his medical and there was no way he was going to let me fly it so we got in the plane and he couldn't get it started he just kept cranking and cranking and cranking and I would call that strike number one well after four or five minutes he finally got it started as we begin taxiing I asked him if all the avionics works to which he said no the transponder doesn't work well I already knew if I bought the plane I would have to do a ATSB update for 2020 and I was hoping to do a you avionics installation which would have taken around maybe $2,000 so with an inoperative transponder I would have to completely replace the entire unit which would be $3,500 or more and for me that was strike number two he then let me begin taxing from the right seat and when I tried out the brakes I noticed they hardly work in fact they went all the way to the floor so I would call that strike number three it also had some problems tracking straight so when we got back to the hangar and he shut the engine down I jumped out and I looked at the front tire and notice that on one side of the tire the tread was really worn down so that meant that something was out of alignment so I walked back from the plane to get a better perspective and that's when I noticed that the front fork was bent so that is strike number four and while it was focused on the tires I took a look at the rear tires and notice that they were halfway flat but huge cracks in them where they were dry rotted so that was strike number five so the owner of the plane told me that just three days prior to me showing up he had an annual inspection so here I am thinking if a mechanic signed off on a plane that had these kind of problems what else did he overlook granted these weren't air worthiness issues but there are still safety hazards I ended up thanking him for his time and I even offered to give him $100 because I didn't want to be seen as one of those tire kickers that the aviation community dislikes so much anyway he refused to take the cash I went home and began researching the repairs and updates that I felt were necessary and that $10,000 airplane suddenly became a $16,000 airplane assuming that nothing else went wrong if a cylinder too went out that price would jump by a few thousand dollars more if you keep your eyes open there are says the 150s they come up on the market with around five hundred hours since major overhaul and in a whole lot better condition for around twenty thousand dollars after what I experienced I'm under the impression that it's probably better to get to twenty thousand dollar plane and save myself the hassle of doing all the repairs also knowing that the twenty thousand dollar airplane has probably been better maintained with less hidden surprises I'm sharing this experience as food for thought and as a word of caution concerning those really good deals I hope this video will be of some help if you're in the market to buy an airplane and you're hoping to find one really cheap once again this is brother Dee and if you found this information helpful or even somewhat amusing be sure to LIKE subscribe and share this video [Music]

Channel: LeadingEdge

Views: 71,430

Rating: 4.8335609 out of 5

Keywords: Buying an Airplane, Buying an Aircraft, Purchasing an Airplane, Purchasing an Aircraft, Buying a Cessna, Purchasing a Cessna, Airplane Ownership, Aircraft Ownership, Cheap Airplanes, Inexpensive Airplanes, Cessna 150B, Barnstormers Cessna, Tradeaplane Cessna, Craigslist Cessna, Craigslist Airplane, Lebanon-Springfield Airport, Lebanon Kentucky, MojoGrip

Id: pn1KHrCG7_w

Length: 5min 46sec (346 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 13 2019