Bad Stories about Plane Purchases

"Bob Noel" wrote in message
...
well, it's hardly ethical to base a negotiating point on a
bogus premise.

It may or may not be a bogus premise. The buyer will tell the seller what
they feel the airplane is worth. For some buyers, damage that occurred 30
years ago may well be a factor in their opinion of what the airplane is
worth. That usually would mean that that buyer would not get to buy that
particular plane, but it doesn't make the buyer unscrupulous.

In any case, the buyer does not have the ability to force a price on the
seller. A seller who accepts a price from a buyer on the basis of
information provided to that seller by the buyer has no reason for
complaint. They could just as easily have verified the information
themselves, rather than relying on the buyer.

Negotiation is an art poorly understood by most. It seems that there are
some people who believe that unless both the buyer and the seller come
completely clean with their ability to pay, desire to sell or buy, and every
tidbit of information that might affect the bid and buy price, some sort of
bad behavior is at work. When in fact, not having those things happen is
just what happens when a couple of strangers haggle.

Nothing unscrupulous about it.

Like I said, there are plenty of ways for a buyer to be unscrupulous, but
trying to talk the price down on the basis of damage history, no matter how
old, just isn't one of them.

Pete

One thing that I don't understand, and hopefully someone here will
enlighten me, is why it is so sacred to have an aircraft that hasn't had
accident damage.

Our plane had a bad landing accident when it was just a few months out of
the Piper factory, way back in 1974. It was repaired at a Piper service
center, and has never been damaged since.

I'm sure that incident adversely affected the resale price for the first
decade or so after the accident -- but it certainly hasn't had any impact
since.

At the pre-buy my A&P looked at the logs, looked at the plane, said "hmph",
and never mentioned it again.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

tony roberts wrote in message news:nospam-4DDD2A.22064411082004@shawnews...

One thing that I don't understand, and hopefully someone here will
enlighten me, is why it is so sacred to have an aircraft that hasn't had
accident damage.

Karma. Any 172 that survives 5000 hours of rental use without a good
pranging must have gotten an extra coat of magic pixie dust at the
factory.

Two of my friends each have aircraft that had accident damage over 30
years ago.
So What?
They have flown beautifully for more than 30 years since the accident -
so what is the big deal? I absolutely don't get it. - It would be
different if the accident was 5 flight hours ago - but these are more
than a major TBO away.

Shh! If everybody starts figuring out that a modest scrape a few
decades ago doesn't make a plane unflyable a lot of the good deals
will disappear.

In Alaska the definition of an salable PA-18 is one on which you can
still make out the registration plate. They'll happily rebuild the
whole plane around it with 90% new parts. But hey, it'll still have a
major damage history.

-cwk.