Pressurized Skymaster

I'm interested in hearing from people who have direct knowledge regarding
the care and feeding of the P337. I have always admired the design and I
think it has a lot to offer for the money on the current used market. I have
read everything I can get my hands on, and I have talked to many of the
people in the owners group. I have a little reservation in taking the word
of people who have committed to a plane; we all tend to be more optimistic
in our portrayal of our aircraft than realistic. I would like to know what
experience people have had though, not what they have heard through the
rumor mill. Thanks Frank

wrote in message
...

I'm interested in hearing from people who have direct knowledge regarding
the care and feeding of the P337. I have always admired the design and I

Well, I do not own a P337 but I did shop for one very intensely in 1997 when
I was comparing the P337 vs. the P210. Eventually I decided the Skymaster
had a critical engine with engine-out performance so marginal that it was
not all that much of an advantage compared with my "critical engine" in my
P210. Even more striking though -- and probably the real reason I decided
against the P337 -- is that after viewing a number of samples of each
airplane type for sale, it became very clear to me that P210s as a whole
were maintained well whereas P337s as a whole were maintained on a
shoestring budget and more than once in the examples I looked at were so
awful with protruding wires and other missing equipment that I could not
bear to even go for a test flight. Maybe this was just a fluke among the
planes I saw, but it happened enough time that I began to think there is
something in the demographics of the pilots who choose these various
airplanes to make it more of a trend than a fluke.. then again that was 6
years ago so who knows what the case is today.

Also it depends where you plan to fly the plane... another dealbreaker with
the P337 is that you can get it with boots but not known-ice. At least for
anyone planning to fly in the Northeast or Midwest it seems silly to me to
buy a plane of the price and performance of the P337 yet not have known-ice
capability.

--
Richard Kaplan, CFII

www.flyimc.com

On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 22:51:08 -0400, martin201 wrote:

I'm interested in hearing from people who have direct knowledge regarding
the care and feeding of the P337. I have always admired the design and I
think it has a lot to offer for the money on the current used market. I have
read everything I can get my hands on, and I have talked to many of the
people in the owners group. I have a little reservation in taking the word
of people who have committed to a plane; we all tend to be more optimistic
in our portrayal of our aircraft than realistic. I would like to know what
experience people have had though, not what they have heard through the
rumor mill. Thanks Frank

Some friends are about to purchase a 337 (non-pressurized and non-turbo).
We looked at a number of these planes and from a maintenance prespective,
the pressurized and turbocharged units look tight. There is a lot of
pipes in a rather confined space. So plan on simple things like oil
changes taking a bit longer because of the need to disassemble pieces.

With that said, it did not look any worse than a friend's T210 that had an
intercooler. He has to remove that component to get to his oil filter.

jerry