Page 29 - Jan22T

and equipage to time on the market and asking price. Time well spent perhaps, but our plane came through a different door in the end.
To say the search was obsessive is not to say it was impulsive. I must have looked at 20 Cheyennes in two years. During that span, I’d drop in on Bob Hunt and company at Friend Air Care in Washington County, Pennsylvania, from time to time. Bob and Dave’s tutelage was as essential as it was kind. Bob combed records, checked maintenance histories, offered budgeting numbers. He was a valued interlocutor. It left me to wonder what he wouldn’t do for me once I became his customer. If it has to do with a Piper Cheyenne, someone at Friend has the answer. Before I ever made an offer – and I made a few – Bob helped me broad stroke a maintenance plan.
I also pestered Mr. Pinto of Star Aero in New Jersey. I relentlessly picked the brain of “Pay 2” owner- operator, Steve Lefferts. I leaned on the cowl of whatever airplane the sage of Bartow, Bill Turley of Aircraft Engineering, happened to be working on, absorbing as much as I could. Sometimes wisdom is practical. Expounding on the relative merits of the Cheyenne 1 versus the Cheyenne 2, Bill counseled me. “But if you decide to go with the 2, Pete, just make sure you watch out for the SAS vane on her nose,” he said as he rubbed his own shoulder. “That god#@! thing will get you every time!”
I never would have made it to engine start were it not for Mike Lovelace, my brother Stephan, Steve “Rug” Riggs of Ardent Jet Group, or Stacey Jordan of Palm Beach Avionics. It takes a village, and they understood the specific gravity. Forget about houses. This was the biggest transaction of my life, one I had to get right for the sake of a happy marriage. One screwup and those call letters on the tail would forever stand mockingly for “Oh My Gaffe!”
Home Field Surprise
Poet T.S. Eliot could well have been writing about my turbine quest when he wrote:
“We shall not
cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Because poetically enough, we ended up right back where we started, under our own roof. The hangar door N770MG was hiding behind was only 200 feet or so from Mike’s shop door. TML Aircraft is also home to our nonprofit, Archangel Airborne. I must have passed by the airplane 50 times in the past 10 years. She’d been under my nose the whole time.
0MG’s status as a repo might best serve as a cautionary tale. No amount of research fully insulates the buyer of a 40-year-old airplane from jackpots. Hot Section Inspections can run six figures. Don’t go spelunking in repossession caves unless you’ve a yen for that sort of thing. Repos are rarely the deal they first appear to be, and 0MG was no exception. Were it not for a home-field advantage wrought by A&P Mike Lovelace and his onsite maintenance facility, I’d have gotten out of the bidding process on 0MG while the getting was still good.
Ultimately, I banked on the reliable reputation of her powerplants. As Bob Pinto – speaking of PT6s on the MORE program – put it, “Look at it this way, the FAA certifies those things to 8,000 hours...8,000 hours! The F-A-A!” At 4,000 hours, mine were barely midlife.
Like the Navajo and Twinco before her, our Cheyenne will serve two masters. When she’s not a family of five mover, she’ll be the flagship for the humanitarian operations of Archangel Airborne, a faith-based nonprofit operating up and down the eastern seaboard and Caribbean (archangelairborne.org). Naturally,
January 2022 / TWIN & TURBINE • 27
New
• PT6-28 combustion liners
• Containment rings
• Inlet screens
• Nozzles
• Airframe and powerplant fuel filters
• Fuel drains
• Concorde battery and tender
• ELT battery
• Hobbs meter
• Heater pressure switch
• LED landing, taxi, strobe lights
• Garmin 345X
• Garmin 600 TXi
• Midcom 302
• Flightstream 210
• Icom handheld
• USB ports
• USAF star and bar, US flag decals
• Tires
Refurbished
• Right fuel pump
• Right fuel control unit
• Garmin 530W TAWS
• Collins color radar
• Bendix M4D computer and roll servo
• Air conditioning compressor
• O2 bottle
• Prop spinners
Removed
• Engine fire suppression bottles/squibs
• Ramp hailer
• Garmin 430W
• GDL39
• Collins ADI/HSI
• Radar altimeter
• Stormscope
• Stereo system
• 35 lbs of derelict wiring, racks,
cannon plugs, etc.