Walking the floor of a hustling maintenance shop the other day, it was easy to spot planes—old Rockwells, twin Cessnas, Bonanzas—you would want to buy because these days, the better shops only work on well-maintained machines. If you buy a rat with pages of major squawks, don’t be surprised when a shop manager unapologetically tells you to bring it back after someone else wrenched it to the shop’s standards—especially if you are coming in as a new customer. “I have barely enough technicians to maintain the planes—to high standards—of my existing good customers and can’t get bogged down with a new customer’s plane that’s going to be a hangar queen,” one told me. A reader with an early 2000s Skylane told me his otherwise good shop won’t work on it anymore because it isn’t a turbine.
The point is to buy the best used airplane you can find, and that means digging deep into the logbooks and even deeper when inspecting the airframe. Stand your ground if the seller/broker won’t address major issues, or deduct the price of a high-quality repair. It’s nearly impossible to find a turnkey used plane, but with a refurb you can come close and your shop will want to work on it.
A&P Paul
A lot of Aviation Consumer’s maintenance coverage needs help from well-trained and well-spoken A&P mechanics, and we found just that with Paul Pelletier, aka A&P Paul. Pelletier, an airplane owner and flight instructor, was hangared near our editorial offices in Connecticut. A technical high school teacher who founded the forward-thinking Middletown Aerospace Program in the center of Connecticut’s high-level aviation industry, his goal was to launch students into the aviation trade (including the growing UAV markets) with limited educational debt and good hands-on training.
For Aviation Consumer, Pelletier was instrumental in our various ADS-B coverage, and his field installations of different systems (that’s a screen shot of Paul in Aviation Consumer’s uAvionix skyBeacon coverage, below) was hugely valuable in our reporting of the ADS-B mandate.
Pelletier and three others from our tight airport community were killed this past September when their Piper crashed in Vermont. I tip my editorial cap to Paul, and send heartbroken regrets to the families left behind.
