..that’s what I thought when I realized how fast (some of) the 170’s were selling.
No more searching – chasing instead!
Well, truth is, I never expected urgency to be the crucial part of the search for my C170. Attention and decisive action, sure, but instant, strictly impulse-driven reaction ?
I guess one can buy ice cream like that, or a rad shirt, but a 60+ year old airplane?
Ok, maybe my recent experience was a statistical outlier, a once-in-a-lifetime event ?
In any case, I took it as a warning, an advice and decided to shorten my response time to any reasonable ad to less than 24 hrs.
That would allow me to gather basic information about the offered aircraft online and avoid having to rely exclusively on those pretty pictures and alluring descriptions by the seller.
And after that, wouldn’t you have guessed, there were no reasonable ads…
…for a while, anyway!
That gave me time to read up on all things Cessna, on desirable modifications, on STOL techniques, and drafting revised, that is ‘increased’, budgets, to accommodate at least some of those enticing mods.
What absorbed most of my time, however, was to understand the entire process of purchasing an airplane.
The sequence and timing of events – technical like inspections, administrative like registration and insuring, and operational like finding a hangar, a mechanic – which needed to happen for me to end up as the owner of a nice and affordable bird, seemed very complicated, especially for a first time buyer like me.
Not being a citizen and therefore living abroad didn’t make things any easier. Add to this my lack of experience in operating a powerplane and the missing connections to the realm of airplanes – as opposed to the world of gliders – and you can understand that I felt like paddling in mud.
But hey, I was on a mission to make a childhood dream come true!
So I vowed to treat all obstacles as challenges and not give up only because at first sight there was no way around them.