Jon Kraus wrote:

I am looking into purchasing my own plane... I think that I am pretty
aware of the costs (as much as a non-owner can be). I would like to
hear from those of you who have unfortunately have had a bad (expensive
or otherwise)experience with a plane purchase. I will also post for good
experiences. Thanks !!

Well, you're starting with a complex plane, which will mean more surprises
for you, but from what everyone's posting, the Mooneys (metal wing) are
about as simple as complex planes get.

My experiences with my Warrior were neither good nor bad, but I did learn a
lot -- for example, if you want to fly IFR and have old radios in the plane,
be prepared for lots of trips to the avionics tech, especially if the
previous owner was VFR-only and didn't really care if he could hear ident on
nav2 or the CDI was 15 degrees off on alternate Tuesdays. If you learn to
remove the radios yourself so that you can drop them off and pick them up,
and you're a bit flexible about time, and you might find that avionics techs
will try to fit smallish jobs into a single billing hour. They can also
often source used parts for you, since they make most of their money
removing old avionics stacks and installing new ones.

Maintenance costs will likely be your single biggest item, so be *very*
specific about what work you want done on your plane, ask for a rough
estimate in advance (understanding that unexpected problems can show up),
and try to be present while the work is being done: I'm not suggesting that
mechanics are dishonest (on the contrary, mine have been excellent), but it
gets expensive fast once they start doing things you could do yourself.
They need to understand that you're not one of the toss-them-the-keys,
never-look-under-the-cowling, money-is-no-object owners you see around airports.

In my experience, mechanics (especially the ones used to working on
commercially-registered planes) tend to order expensive parts from the
manufacturer rather than much cheaper third-party parts, especially for
non-critical things like plastics, fairings, windows, etc. -- the people on
the Mooney list will help you learn to source things like that for a
fraction of the price (and typically much higher quality than the
manufacturer's parts as well). That's another big opportunity to control costs.

Even taking all of this into consideration, the rule of thumb is to set
aside 25% of the purchase price as a reserve for unplanned repairs and
upgrades during the first couple of years -- or, in other words, don't spend
more than 80% of what you have available. From my experience, that's about
right. If you accept in advance that you'll have to spend an extra $25K on
a $100K plane in the first couple of years, over and above regular flying
costs, you'll end up with a good story; if you let it catch you by surprise,
you'll end up with a bad one.

Best of luck, and you'll have my envy when you're zooming past me in your
Mooney.


All the best,


David