Make sure you have the owner pick you up at the airport in his car.

You can pretty much make a determination, then and there, about the airplane
just by looking at his car. This happened to me when I went to Denver to
look at an Aztec that was billed as immaculate. When the guy (airline pilot,
that should raise the warning flag) picked me up in a beater BMW I suspected
the worst, and I was sorely disappointed in the airplane.

Sellers often extremely overstate the condition of the airplane for sale.

Beware, and remember the vast majority of pilots are cheapskates!

Karl



wrote in message
...

On 19-Jun-2004, " Mark Miller wrote:

I'll likely have to fly (commercial) to look at it, so I'm curious to
hear
how people handle that. More than
one trip, I would guess.

Any advice would be appreciated.



Before spending a lot of time and money traveling to see the airplane, why
not have an objective person located nearby have a look? What we did in
this case was arrange for a local mechanic (NOT the one doing regular
maintenance on the plane) spend about an hour looking for obvious
problems.
This is NOT an adequate pre-buy, just an initial screening to keep you
from
wasting time and money on obvious dogs. A good $60-80 investment.

If the mechanic (or it could be a trusted pilot friend) reports back that
the plane APPEARS to be as advertised, THEN go ahead and arrange for a
thorough pre-buy and/or an in-person inspection.

--
-Elliott Drucker