What Twelve Airplanes Taught One Owner About Buying the Right One - E367
There are two airplanes in Mark Woglom's hangar. One is a Citation CJ3+ that carries him from New Hampshire to Florida nonstop. The other is an Icon A5 he bought six weeks ago, for the simple reason that you cannot go sightseeing in a jet.
Between them sit twenty-five years and roughly ten other aircraft. Woglom has owned about a dozen, and the lesson he draws from all of it is not the one most buyers want to hear: the perfect airplane does not exist. Everything about an airplane is a trade-off, and the buyer's job is not to eliminate the compromises but to choose which ones they can live with.
Start with three questions
Woglom organizes every purchase around what he calls the three F's — finances, features, and function.
Finances come first, and not just the purchase price. An airplane has a capital cost whether you finance it or pay cash, because money in a brokerage account earns something and money in an airplane does not. Six to seven percent is a reasonable planning figure either way.
Features are the negotiable middle: autopilot, avionics, a parachute, known-ice capability. Real preferences, but ones that should bend to the first and third questions.
Function is the one buyers skip, and Woglom thinks the better word is mission. How far will this airplane actually go, with how many people aboard, off what runway, in the weather you actually fly? Not the brochure figure — the real one.
Budget the costs that ambush new owners
Purchase price is the number people fixate on and rarely the one that ends an ownership. The recurring costs are what decide whether flying stays fun.
Insurance runs roughly two percent of hull value on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar airplane and closer to one percent as you move toward seven figures. If a step-up airplane means an inflated first-year premium, Woglom's advice is to treat that as a one-time cost of entry, like a pre-buy inspection, rather than a reason to walk away.
Maintenance is the hardest number to pin down and the one worth the most effort. Call a service center that specializes in the type you're considering, ask what they've actually been seeing for annuals, and budget the top of the range they give you. Two owners of the same model can see wildly different annual bills, and the difference is almost always deferred maintenance that came with the airplane.
Then there are the costs nobody puts in the spreadsheet: hangar or tie-down, database subscriptions, recurrent training, state and local taxes, ramp and overnight fees.
Ignore the noise
Woglom is blunt about where bad information comes from. Every owner is passionate about the decision they already made — the Cirrus forum will tell you the Cirrus is the best airplane, and the Bonanza forum will tell you the same about theirs. Brokers tend toward whatever they know best. Manufacturer range figures assume a slow cruise, a light load, and no headwind.
His replacement for all of it is a technique worth stealing. Take every airplane you're considering and fly the same 200-nautical-mile leg in ForeFlight or Garmin Pilot. Whatever fuel that leg burns becomes your reserve — the same reserve for every candidate. Now run your actual missions and see how far each one goes. You've stripped out the marketing and the forum lore in a single move, and you're finally comparing like with like.
One more: pull real empty weights from Controller or Trade-A-Plane rather than the manufacturer's literature, which describes an unequipped airplane almost nobody buys.
The rule underneath all of it
Woglom's parents told him not to get house poor. He passes it on with one word changed: never get plane poor. An airplane you're straining to pay for stops being fun quickly.
And for anyone staring at a Bonanza they can't quite afford and a 172 they can, he offers the line that ought to be printed inside every hangar door: if you really love to fly, a stop is not the end of the world.
[Listen to the full conversation with Mark Woglom — Episode 367.]