Friday night Earl and I were sitting in the movie theatre waiting to be enthralled by “Captain America: Civil War” when a message popped up on my phone. A pilot friend asked if I had any interest in purchasing his airplane. I’ve flown his airplane on a couple of occasions; it’s in beautiful shape and is not as old as the two airplanes I fly as part of the flying club. It is meticulously maintained. The last time I flew it I mused to myself that I wouldn’t mind owning that airplane.
So Earl and I decided to go ahead with the preliminaries of the airplane purchase. There’s quite a bit involved with buying an airplane and one of the biggies is crunching the numbers to make sure you’re not going to go so far into debt that you end up buying an airplane that you can’t afford to fly. The Budgeting Department declared that we were good there but we were getting close to the upper limits of the purchasing budget. The Budgeting Department then skipped town for the week in the name of work. I’ve spent the last several days putting together the required paperwork for financing, working with aircraft mechanics and trying to find an insurance company that would insure a pilot like me. I was eating, sleeping and spending all my free time involved with all things airplane.
Without getting into the weeds, after speaking with the aircraft mechanic, the airplane was indeed in excellent shape and would make a fantastic short-term purchase for me, but if I was going to further my pilot career and start flying in the clouds and such, it’d take a considerable chunk of change to upgrade the avionics.
I decided to counter the asking price with another offer. After a few hours of consideration, the owner decided not to sell the airplane after all.
Nothing lost, nothing gained.
So I’m back in the market for my own airplane and in the meanwhile I’ll continue to fly the two airplanes that I co-own in the flying club. I’ve been using the month of May as a turnaround point to try to take a more positive spin on life so this experience has been an awesome learning experience. Am I disappointed? Perhaps a little bit, but I now have a better sense of what I want, what I’m looking for and how I’m going to get it.
My dreams continue to fly.
