Montblack wrote:
("Ron Natalie" wrote)

Back when we had the Navion available for rental we used to give a
discount on the rental while you were getting checked out.



Overall, was renting out your Navion a positive experience, or would you
hop in the local Way-Back Machine and tell yourself - don't do it?


Well, it would have been nice to allow it to have worked. We had a
number of mechanical issues (just us wringing out stuff that we would
have found anyhow as private owners). The thing that doomed us was
incompetent maintenance shop (honest at least, but incompetent) that
kept the plane from being as available as it needed to be and a small
taxiing incident with a student that knocked her off the line for a
couple of months. The thing that really pulled the plug however was
that the insurance for rentals of a lot of things (our operation also
had a 170, a 180, and a turbo arrow) got pretty close to unobtainable.

We never really had too much of a problem other than we never got the
thing rented enough to cover the costs. Insurance (when we could get
it) was 3X what it was for private use.

I think less and less of the aviation insurance industry every day.
It's going to kill aviation faster than rising gas prices are going
to.