Everyone has heard the saying “there’s nothing more expensive than a cheap airplane,” but what exactly were they talking about?

In your experience, what were the actual maintenance items on your cheap airplane that appeared post-purchase?

Or was it simply upgrades? Curious what you wish you had budgeted for.

The hidden cost of a cheap plane for most people is probably labor. Paying someone $100+ an hour to fix, or find and troubleshoot whatever. Cheap planes have a lot of deferred maintenance, and everything in them is worn out from being 50+ years old in many cases. My gut says that labor is about equal to parts cost on average over time. Cheap planes often have corrosion or other ugly problems that can be impossible to fix.

I haven't bought particularly cheap planes, but have replaced a starter, alternator, paid to fix an engine monitor, many engine gaskets (to stop minor leaks), rebuilt a nose strut, lapped the exhaust valve on a cylinder, redid seats, and am rebuilding the airbox on one airplane. That could easily have been $25K if I had paid an A&P to the labor. As is it, I'm probably at $10K.

Class E wrote:Everyone has heard the saying “there’s nothing more expensive than a cheap airplane,” but what exactly were they talking about?

In your experience, what were the actual maintenance items on your cheap airplane that appeared post-purchase?

Or was it simply upgrades? Curious what you wish you had budgeted for.

I always say to prospective airplane owners - you don't need to be rich, but you don't want to be cheap.

Buying a plane from someone who cheapskated through years of maintenance, which is possible to do if you have the right mechanic connections, can be a nightmare. You will likely find yourself playing catch up on MX instead of flying the plane, which is probably what you actually bought it to do.

Another factor is that there are desirable models, which fetch a higher cost on the market, vs less desirable models, which have earned a reputation for being not so great for some reason or another.

Horsepower, lift, speed, range, durability, reliability and payload are major factors when evaluating an airplane purchase. The models that exhibit reasonably decent levels on these points of criteria are typically not cheap. That means that cheap airplanes are typically short on one or many of these desirable characteristics. Discovering your airplanes shortcomings is flight can be quite expensive...

I used to fly around the higher backcountry in a very underpowered airplane. It taught me some great lessons in energy management, but operating with wider safety margins is worth the extra money in my opinion. You get tired of learning lessons the hard way - barely clearing the trees, using 90% of the runway, not being able to climb, etc...

Backcountry flying is not a low cost endeavor. If you are pinching pennies, RC might be a better choice

I've purchased a few, but not a lot of airplanes. In my limited experience the asking price of airplanes isn't much of an indicator of whether the first couple years of ownership are going to be enjoyable at a reasonable cost, or frustrating and surprisingly expensive. It has more to do with whether it was being flown regularly and maintained to some standard that the owner and shop are able to explain and defend.

I read an article a few years ago that talked about the typical ownership cycle of a private aircraft. Over something like a 5-10 period the new owner initially puts a fair amount of money into dealing with maintenance issues and upgrades. Often the former are discovered in the course of doing the latter. The airplane then gets flown regularly for several years, during which time maintenance is both regular and predictable. Then life changes, and the owner has less time or interest in flying the airplane so the utilization diminishes. Less flying means less opportunity to identify new snags and minor issues, so they tend to build up, often unbeknownst to the owner. It finally gets to the point where it's getting flown so little that the cost of hangar and insurance makes no sense, so the owner decides to sell. They think they have an airplane in great condition. The last time they put 100 hours on it in a year it was great. But that was 3 years ago. The new owner finds out it's an expensive proposition bringing a 50 year old machine back to the state of reliability you'd trust your kid's life to. And the cycle starts over again. That airplane that's been flown 30 hours in the last 4 years is going to be a bundle of surprises.

The other scenario that's bit me is buying an airplane that was held in a multi-person partnership. Not sure why this surprised me, but it did. Turns out that's a recipe for lowest common denominator maintenance (the cheapest guy in the group can have the power of veto over what 'optional' items get fixed) as well as inconsistent operation. Another bonus is that minor snags don't get recognized and reported as diligently as they would with a single owner because there's not the same reference to 'that's not the way it was the last time I flew it'.

In 2000 I bought a Bonanza off a family member that had been under-utilized for the previous four years. Oh my, was that a financial adventure.

In 2014 I bought a locally owned Husky off the second owner who'd had it for 5 years and flown it regularly. It was very reasonably priced and has been the most squawk-free airplane I've owned.

I have a couple other stories, but the themes are the same - scenarios that have made airplanes unexpectedly more expensive than I anticipated, and neither had much to do with the initial asking or purchase price. My $0.02.

Cheers.

Mike

All 3 planes I have purchased had been sitting for 7-14 years. They were cheap, but they needed tires, seats, carpets, windshield and side windows, had no radios or I took out the radio and tossed it in the trash (Narco Mark 12-A in 2004), and the paint was "bad". I stripped and polished all 3 of them, so I don't know what a paint job costs. All 3 of them had enough electrical problems that I ended up replacing every switch in them and one of them also all the fuse holders, as well as stripping out a bunch of wiring from radios that were removed years ago. One of them I removed a CB antenna and coax. The strangest problem I found was mud dauber wasps had crawled into the venturis on one of them and plugged up the vacuum lines over a foot into the plane from both sides. That took me all day to clean out, think about the price of having an A&P do that for you. If you can't do your own work, it may not be worth buying some planes for $1.00 and resurrecting them.

Everything has a cost associated, more so with airplanes, parts have a price but labor can really add up fast. Assuming some level of mechanical aptitude and interest get involved, locate a A&P who both welcomes and encourages owner participation. You don't have to be a MacGyver just willing to listen, take guidance, direction and do as your told.