Time to Buy

Mission Impossible#

Since I became a private pilot in 2011, I have mostly flown alone. Aside from occasional $100 hamburger runs with friends and a few day trips to beach with my wife, my logbook was mostly filled with currency & proficiency flights. I've always wanted to fly more, but life with young children is demanding. This summer, after my son attended Future Aviators Summer Camp at New Garden Flying Field and a few short hops with the kids individually, I realized it was time to become a flying family.

There's only 1 problem. We're a family of 5 and my flying club's Cherokee 140 only has 4 seats. To avoid serious family drama, I knew I'd have to find access to a 5 or 6 seater. There aren't many piston singles that fit this bill, so I could easily eliminate most from my research. I'm also fairly low time, with about 200hrs PIC, none of which is high-performance or complex, so insurance for a retractable gear plane was going to kill me.

Unfortunately, a quick look at prices helped me eliminate the Bonanza and Matrix. My max budget would be under $100k alone or mid-$100's with a partner. Chatting with a few pilot friends about my plan, they quickly steered me toward the Piper PA-32 line. After sitting in a friend's completely restored Lance, I knew a PA-32 was what I wanted!

How 29 Whiskey Found Me#

Part of becoming a flying family was for me to get my instrument rating. The safety factor and flexibility the instrument rating provides was a must for me. As fate would have it, the CFII I had started my instrument rating with was also an aircraft broker.

With me just getting into the search and the market being so hot, we decided to casually watch listings to see if anything came up. The idea was to hopefully let the market cool down into 2022 and buy then. I had my eye on a few Cherokee 6 listings, but they were far away and I really wasn't compelled to pursue them. I used this time to do lots and lots of reseach about the different PA-32 variants. The more I researched, the more I knew these were the right planes for our family.

Then it happened. Jimmy called and said he might have found the perfect plane for me right at my home field, New Garden Airport (N57)! It was a low-time, recently overhauled 1966 Cherokee Six 260.

Not only was it right at my home airport, low time, recently overhauled with complete logs and no damage history, the asking price was half of everything else I had been looking at. The seller had owned the plane for 10 years, had used it to get his instrument & commercial ratings and to fly his family back and forth to their beach house and more recently, back and forth to college. His kids were now out of college and he wasn't flying it enough to justify keeping it. He was open to being a partner on it if I were interested, or selling outright.

Jimmy and I met up one evening for a quick demo flight. She flew perfectly. The paint and interior were original and while not in terrible shape, they will both need to be addressed shortly. The seller had factored this into the asking price. The avionics were adequate with a GNS430 (Non-WAAS), King KX155 Nav/Com 2, Bendix King KN64 DME, GMA 340 audio panel, GTX 335 transponder and Century IIB auto-pilot. Most importantly, the engine was nearly new. The factory reman was done in 2018 with about 250 hours on it. TTAF was around 3000 hours. Another huge plus was the aircraft had been at N57 (always hangared) since the early 1970's with almost all of the maintenance done by the shop on field. This meant I could skip the usual prebuy inspection and just talk to the mechanics who knew the plane well. One A&P had been working on the plane for almost 40 years!

Clearly the pros far outweigh the cons. After the blessing from my fabulous wife, planning out short-term vs long-term updates and getting insurance quotes, we settled on a full buyout cash purchase price. 29W was mine!