According to seaplane instructors, the most commonly uttered phrase by a landplane pilot following the first seaplane lesson is: “My Gawd, this is fun. Why didnt I do it sooner?” The second is often, “I want one of these things.” With the hook firmly set, lets look at what the truly smitten goes through in determining how much fun he or she can afford and what kind of seaplane to buy. We strongly suggest that the first step in such a process is to join the Seaplane Pilots Association. Its an excellent organization for those who want to have anything to do with seaplanes. Its forums contain a wealth of information on specifics of seaplane ownership and operation. What constitutes a fun seaplane? We consider fun seaplanes as ones where the idea is to fly purely for pleasure; in which the owner wants to knock around the sky and explore the waterways that are suitable and legal for seaplanes to alight; to take at least one passenger and enough stuff for a picnic or to go fishing or maybe stay overnight at a remote cabin or campsite on the shore. Fun seaplanes are for the aeronautical version of the sailors “gunkholing.” The airplane is not going to work for a living, need to haul a lot of stuff, travel great distances or handle particularly rough water or weather. We opine that fun seaplanes have but one engine that develops less than 200 HP, but we recognize that such a cutoff is arbitrary. The 145-HP Aeronca Sedan and 150- to 180-HP Piper Super Cubs and 180-HP Huskies are often serious, working seaplanes hauling cargo and people on a day-to-day basis.

The Piper Matrix is un-American. The rules clearly state that automobiles and airplanes are to get bigger, heavier, more complicated and less efficient as the production years pass. Go look it up. Cars outgrow garages and airplanes lose useful load. Simplifying an American vehicle is not acceptable. Increasing an airplanes efficiency and useful load is probably a federal offense. The offender-Piper-has created a very good airplane thats selling as fast as it can be built. Piper took a risk in creating a simplified, unpressurized version of its decades-old Malibu/Mirage. To the extent market history exists for such a decision, its lousy. In 1980, Cessna produced an unpressurized version of the Model 340A, the 335, which did poorly and was dropped after only one year of production. In the new Matrix, Piper didnt make Cessnas mistake of reducing performance of an existing model and it kept the same 350-HP Lycoming TIO-540-AE2A that the Mirage has. Piper also spent money on market surveys to assess demand for the proposed airplane as we’ll as the right price point. Despite the current economic downturn, it appears the decision was a winner.

Prospective aircraft buyers must decide how to structure the ownership of the airplane. For an individual, the options are to put it in the owners name or to form a corporation to own the airplane. with the individual as the sole shareholder. (An L.L.C. is so nearly identical that we’ll use the word corporation to cover both.) If there is to be more than one owner, the aircraft may be owned as a partnership, with each owners name showing on the registration, a limited partnership (so rare in general aviation that we’ll ignore it here) or as an asset of a corporation with the owners being shareholders. The quick and dirty advice for which is best is simple: For an individual, a corporation does not provide any advantage unless the owner/pilot is doing significant charitable flying (medical mercy, environmental, etc.) and wants to use the available tax deduction for renting the airplane to him or herself. For group ownership, a corporation provides benefits that are worth exploring if the owners are willing to do the paperwork, reporting and file the required tax returns.

EADS-Socata, Piper, Pilatus and Cessna have been building single-engine turboprops for several years now, and their assembly lines appear at or near capacity as there are healthy waiting lists for new airplanes. Pilatus and Cessna originally built their airplanes for cargo, bush and military operators but found, to their delight, that owner-pilots got in line to buy. On the surface, these four airplanes are quite different. Despite all being powered by a version of the PT6, cruise speeds and cabin sizes differ noticeably, as does the ability to carry a load. Yet the series seems to attract a certain kind of buyer: one who wants the reliability of a turbine, doesnt want the hassle and expense of a type rating and more than one engine; who desires an airplane that can go in any weather the pilot is personally capable of handling, and will either go fast or carry a big load. (We recognize that there are a few other single-engine turboprops, such as the new Quest Kodiak and the PC-6 Turbo Porter, but we are limiting our comparison to airplanes currently built in bulk for the owner-flown market.)

What do you get when you take Paul Bunyan out of the nort woods, force him to part with Babe the blue ox, exchange his wool shirt, boots and blue jeans for an Armani suit and bring him to a trendy cocktail party? A great-looking guy with muscles that fill the sleeves of his suit, who curses, spits on the floor, drains the entire punch bowl and, after offending everyone, staggers out with as much of the buffet as he can carry. Fortunately for Cessna, airplanes don’t behave like humans, so when it decided to dress up one of the most successful back country, dirt strip, beat-it-up-and-haul-anything airplanes in history, the result turned out to be refined, classy and welcome anywhere. Plus, its easy to fly and has a potty.

When contemplating a Pilatus PC-12, you cant help but think of someone who went out to buy an all-terrain vehicle and came home with a luxury, all-wheel–drive motorhome that could go off-road. You have to look past the BMW-designed interior to discover that the Swiss-made turboprop was originally created for use in the Third World. It was thus conceived to be a utilitarian vehicle that was tough and capable enough to operate from short, dirt runways, could tanker lots of fuel because availability might be questionable and still carry on if something broke out in the bush.

All but obscured by the lava flow of VLJ hype is this simple reality: For more than a year, one of the most conservative and oldest airplane manufacturers in the world has been delivering a single-engine turboprop with the performance, legs and load-carrying ability to make any would-be VLJ buyer think twice. The EADS Socata TBM 850 whistles along at a max cruise of 320 knots at FL260, only 20 knots slower than most of the VLJs advertise. It goes further with a load of passengers and burns a lot less fuel. For the owner-pilot, the speed, operating costs and the allure of limiting insurance-mandated training to three days a year rather than nearly two weeks for the VLJ means that the 850 is a contender. We were surprised by the numbers, frankly.

Cessna calls its Citation Mustang an “entry level jet” rather than the now ubiquitous very light jet appellation. That might be because Cessna has no pretensions about who will buy Mustangs: mostly individual owners rather than the corporate and charter world.