Watch This Before You Buy An Airplane!

what's up YouTube welcome to the aviators Channel so I'm gonna apologize in advance this could be kind of a long video but it's gonna be answering questions that I get all the time I don't know what it is about my channel but I tend to not get a lot of comments but get a lot of emails like dozens and that's cool I'm totally cool with it I'm not so great at answering them but I'm cool with getting them and the biggest question I get is the cost of aircraft ownership airplanes are expensive period I mean you're gonna spend a heap of money that you you know hopefully you saved it and the other the other thing is is you know buying an airplane is probably the cheapest part of flying it's the maintenance it's the fuel it's all that other stuff that you just don't think about you get fall in love with the idea of owning an airplane and and you go buy one and then it sits in a hangar because you can't afford to fly you can't afford to afford to maintain it you can't afford to do all the things you dreamed about doing with the airplane unfortunately here we're pretty fortunate we kind of do what we want but that's not always the case so I get a lot of questions about like well you know I want to buy a Cessna 150 what do you think and I'm always like do it yeah yeah there are very few airplanes that I'm gonna tell you not to buy I like all airplanes in fact I was going through my logbook this has probably been about a month ago and looked at all the different types of airplanes I flew I've flown like obsessed no 140s 170s 172s 180s 180 to 185 you know all the piper varieties some some warbirds some Jets some you know turbo props and it was like 42 different types and there was only one of those airplanes that I flew that I really didn't enjoy and it was jabiru of all things the rudder yeah long story but anyways you know so when somebody reaches out to me and says okay well well I want to buy 150 and I'm like cool do it you know there are very few airplanes that when you buy them can't be made air worthy it just takes money and so when you buy an airplane that's the first thing you should do is have a really thorough inspection done and and you know build a budget around what it's gonna cost to make it what you want the other question I would ask back if you're telling me you want to buy an airplane is what's your mission right they talked about that in pilot training what's your mission are you you know is your goal to go flying at get a burger on on the weekend or is it to fly cross-country well if you're gonna fly cross-country a Cessna 150 probably isn't gonna be a good airplane for you if you're gonna you know take more than one other person with you with a heavy load a Cessna 150 is not a great airplane for that they're great for all sorts other things but just not that so what's your mission that's what you should ask okay in my case my mission has changed over the years you know I my very first airplane that I owned or I owned a fifth of it was a beech Staggerwing and I absolutely loved the airplane but I only lasted a year in the partnership because it was a partnership you know so that's the other question you have to ask yourself is okay well if I can't own all of an airplane I can't afford to maintain it I'll get a group of guys and and we'll go buy an airplane and and we'll share it and we'll share the expenses and in theory it sounds like a really good thing for me it just didn't work because I'm Way too OCD to you know partners tell me what they are gonna do for me it just wasn't a good situation and and so I you know sold my share to the other members and then I bought them all and I thought I wanted them all and I did won them all because it was a great backcountry performer and you know then as I started traveling a lot for work you know I wanted to use my own airplane and I'm all just isn't a good cross-country platform you know to fly six seven hundred miles away every single week back and forth and so I sold them all bought a bonanza my mission had changed I wanted a you know an airplane that was a great cross-country performer and when I was looking for that airplane I had narrowed it down to a bonanza or a Cirrus and both are outstanding airplanes obviously but it was the insurance cost for the Cirrus that that caused me to pick up my be 35 B love the plane I put four thousand hours on it and two engines and all-new synthetic vision I made it the way I wanted it flew that airplane everywhere for for probably six seven years and fluid you know eight to twelve hours a week so it wasn't like I wasn't you know flying a lot and it met my mission perfectly well then I stopped traveling and all of a sudden you know the bonanza just sat you know I it wasn't much fun to go fly it 20 minutes to you know grab a burger or whatever and I began flying my RV a lot more now RV why'd I buy an RV well I wanted to teach my kids how to fly great training platform great airplane cheap to operate fast acrobatic if they ever wanted to do something like that you know so the RV still have it still love it fly it all the time and so as my mission continued to evolve you know my my bonanza was sitting in the sitting in my hangar and and not being used and I really got the itch to start backcountry flying again so I built this and there are a bunch of videos on on this i'ma bore you with that but bottom line is you know now my mission is gotten a lot simpler you know if I want to fly cross-country it's typically just me and another person or me by myself the RV is spectacular for that I can get there just as fast as I could in the Bonanza you know if I want to fly backcountry I can load this thing up and goal and 95% of you know we're we're a Super Cub could land and so he incidentally it's funny people tease me about this airplane you know why would you spend all that time and money on a on a on a nose dragger you should be flying the tail wheel listen it's a religion thing I love tail draggers I've got thousands of hours of tail dragger time love them love them but I don't have to worry about wind I don't have to worry about any of that kind of stuff this thing will go into 99% of the places I'm gonna go into you know I'm not gonna be you know bouncing on big rocks and doing all that stuff so that's kind of that so that's the mission thing you know figure out what you're gonna use it for you know and buy the right airplane maintenance this is another when I get a ton of questions on you know what are your annuals cost you know how much deferred maintenance do you have you know my annuals I'm gonna knock out the big ones like the ones that were thousands and thousands of dollars because those were gem induced annuals not not required my typical annual for the RV which is an annual right now incidentally and the Cessna are about twelve to fifteen hundred bucks typically okay that's the annual part of it the deferred maintenance part of it is much different I I never ever ever defer maintenance I you know if there's a squawk on the airplane I just have it fixed and that's my personality I can't help it it is what it is so you know there are two ways to maintain an airplane unfortunately the first is to you know defer all but the dangerous maintenance items or fix them all as soon as they happen and they will happen you'll buy a brand new airplane I did it I bought a brand new mall flying at home I had problems with the auto pilot had to you know have it worked on as soon as I land it so airplanes are big complex things that fly through the air and they're gonna have problems and so you just you have to budget for them in terms of budget I typically would budget about a hundred and twenty dollars per flight hour is if you fly 200 hours a year that's that's a really good number for these types of airplanes but Anza probably probably a little bit more the you know the cost of acquisition for an air airplane is really de minimus when you think about all the money you're gonna put into a changing the oil AV fuel is is a fuel is expensive and then the things that break you know you've got very complex instruments and these things and they they sputter out and die and you have to have them overhauled and and it costs money and so if you're not budget if you're not budgeting kind of a hundred ish an hour for maintenance you know your budgets wrong bottom line let's see hangers hangers or you know a big part of flying I'm one of those people I'm never gonna tie my airplanes up outside I just it's not in me to do it goes back to the OCD but hangers are expensive here in Colorado I have two key hangers and they were about sixty-five thousand dollars apiece to purchase now the problem with purchasing hangers is you don't actually own the ground they sit on the airport does and so you have you know typically a twenty to forty year land lease with your hanger that you own sitting on top of it now banks don't like to finance those so you have to be prepared if you're gonna buy a hanger to you know come up with a good portion of it and cash to you know to to buy them now if you're gonna rent here it I'm at Front Range Airport in in Colorado okay ftg and it's gonna cost you three to four hundred dollars a month to rent a tea hanger that's expensive you know especially if you have multiple airplanes and now which hopefully you're smart enough not to make that mistake but if you're like me and have done that then then you know your cost to entry is either gonna be you know a couple hundred thousand dollars in I'm sorry $100,000 and hangers or you know three to nine hundred dollars a month in in in hanger rent so the other one I get pilot training a lot of people ask me about pilot training and I think that's cool cuz there's a lot of non pilots that watch this channel and and I just think that's awesome that's why we do it right I don't know what it cost to become a pilot these days I know you know I was fortunate to have you know a pilot in the family who you know taught me a majority of you know way back then when I got my license you know how to fly and so I I knew how to fly long before I was able to even you know sit for the test so you know I I think a hundred and fifty an hour is probably a decent number I know that when I did my biannual flight review a couple months ago it was two hours and it was you know a couple hundred dollars but we did it in my own plane you don't have your own plane you're gonna have to you know go rent one that's a good 80 to 100 bucks an hour so you can do the math the minimum requirement is forty hours and you know an equivalent amount of ground school time with an instructor and so it's gonna be pricey but I can tell you you know it opens up the world the adventures I've had and old planes and these planes have been epic and life-changing and and you know if you ever if you're ever thinking about you know should I become a pilot the answer is yes even if you don't ever use it you know it's a the things you learn just about meteorology the things you learn about mechanics the things you learned about learn about fluid dynamics the things you learn about everything it's really cool and you know so I I'm always good for a free airplane ride for for people who want to who want to go up and we've done some really fun ones so there you have it I hope that answers a lot of the questions you know comes down to you know pilot training mission maintenance the cost of unknowns in and you know your hangar space and you know once you figure out those things and put a budget around him the rest is good alright well hopefully I answer your questions and you know keep them coming and if you like this sort of thing like subscribe comment and until next time

Channel: The AV8R's

Views: 122,913

Rating: 4.6939893 out of 5

Keywords: Aircraft purchase, aircraft, aircraft ownership, buying a plane, plane, purchase, pilot training, hangar, hangar rent, hangar purchase, maintenance, aircraft annual, annual, aircraft maintenance, buying an airplane, how to become a pilot, cost to own an airplane, cost, pilot, flying

Id: 4CA0ezeXkQQ

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018