Mark wrote:

I'm Curious about something. Everyone says that a 30-year-old
airplane will not perform like when it was a new airplane.

Not everyone says this. My 25-year-old Cessna 150 met the book performance figures.
At the time, it had a decent paint job, about 600 hours SMOH, and the prop had been
recently overhauled.

My take is that if the plane is in good condition, it will perform as well as it did
when new.

George Patterson
None of us is as dumb as all of us.