Three questions to ask a seller before talking price

A conversation about price makes sense once you know what you are buying. The three questions below take one phone call and make any two candidates comparable.

1. Hours and cycles — airframe and each engine, as separate figures

The listing carries one number: hours. The logbooks carry two — hours and cycles. One cycle is a take-off and a landing.

The ratio between them shows how the aircraft was used. Three thousand hours over one thousand cycles means legs of about three hours each. The same three thousand hours over four and a half thousand cycles means short hops: the fuselage pressurised and depressurised four and a half times more often, the gear absorbed four times the landing loads.

Airframes age by cycles. Sellers talk about hours.

Ask for the figures separately for the airframe and for each engine. Numbers that fail to reconcile are information in themselves: an engine change, a unit taken from another aircraft, a period missing from the record.

2. What falls due in the next twelve months

The answer comes in two parts: checks driven by accumulated hours, and checks driven by the calendar. Add life-limited components approaching their limits.

Calendar items arrive whether the aircraft flew or sat in a hangar. Eight hundred hours over ten years looks like a bargain right up to the moment you learn that two heavy checks are already behind it and a third is six months away.

Add this work up in money. Two aircraft three hundred thousand dollars apart in the listings often meet at zero once that sum is done.

This is also the point where the first-year ownership budget takes shape. An aircraft with a clean twelve months ahead costs more at purchase and less to run in the first year. The arithmetic decides which of the two suits you.

3. Engine programme status

An active hourly-cost maintenance programme transfers to the new owner and forms part of the asset value in the deal.

Three things to establish:

The programme and its coverage level. Cover ranges from basic to comprehensive, and the difference in the schedule of covered work is substantial.

The date of the last payment. A missed payment ends participation, and reinstatement costs more than continuous cover.

Transfer terms. Manufacturer consent, transfer fee, timescales.

Aircraft without a programme still get bought. The cost of the coming overhaul is then calculated from hours flown and deducted from the price, with the money set aside in advance.

Why these three, in this order

All three answers arrive by email within a day and cost nothing. An inspection costs a flight, an engineer, a slot on the ramp and several days. The order of work follows: records first, travel second.

Each candidate ends up producing three lists.

Red closes the deal: gaps in the record with no explanation, an engine programme lapsed years ago, life-limited items with no traceable provenance.

Amber converts into money off the price, line by line, each with its own arithmetic.

Green goes into the plan for the first year of ownership.

"Give me a discount" loses to "here are eleven items and the arithmetic on each of them." The second position is built entirely out of answers to these three questions.

What happens next

With the lists in hand, the shortlist usually halves. What remains goes to a physical inspection, and the inspection then checks specific claims rather than forming a first impression.

That is the whole point of asking early: the expensive part of the process only starts on aircraft that have already survived the cheap part.