Douglas Paterson wrote:

The Socata Trinidad (TB-20) seems to pretty closely match or slightly exceed
the Comanche's performance numbers. For a comparably equipped Comanche,
they seem to cost (acquisition) about the same. Meanwhile, the Trinidad is
a 20-year-younger airplane, with cheaper insurance and (I'm given to
believe) cheaper maintenance due to (a) ease of access and (b) availability
of parts. Plus, the gull-wing doors are appealing to me (ease of
entry/exit, not to mention "cool factor"). Can anyone weigh in here, either
to confirm these observations or to squash my newbie analysis? Other
thoughts?

I had 2 customers that owned Socatas. One sold his because he
wanted something
faster and the other because he couldn't afford to keep it. Parts
come from
France and they are priced accordingly. Windshield was over $1200 fob
France when
one owner over aggressively tried to de-ice his plane. Most of the
screws are metric on
the airframe, not standard AN hardware. The ailerons are actuated
with a torque tube
and push-pull tubes in the wings. The quality of the torque tube was
lacking where
it was attached to the yokes via a u-joint. Prior to the customer
buying the plane someone had tried to drill out the u-joint rivets and
replace them with bolts. Things wallowed out
again and the torque tube assembly needed to be replaced. The
maintenance manuals
are translated from French into English. Interesting reading at
best. In order to
replace the tube the entire bottom cover on the tunnel between the
pilot and co-pilot seats
had to be removed. The tunnel is made of thin steel - not aluminum!
After drilling out
dozens of rivets the tube was accessible. I don't recall what it cost
but it was an
expensive piece of metric sized chrome moly which had to be match
drilled to the
u-joint. It did not come pre-assembled. . The job was time consuming
because clearly
Socata didn't design the plane with this particular repair in mind.
While it may be a new design, if you pull the tail cone off you will
see a stabilator
trim mechanism which looks EXACTLY like the ones found on a Piper
Cherokee.
Over all the airplanes were not bad to work on. They both had IO540
Lycomming
engines on a tubular mount with removable top and bottom cowl pieces.
Once removed
everything was easily accessible. The underside of the fuselage was a
bit crowded
and required the removal of dozens of easily stripped metric screws to
drop the
access covers.

I never had the opportunity to fly one but the owners told be they
were very nimble
on the controls, especially after the sloppy torque tube joint was
replaced.

Gary Plewa
AP/IA
N4GP