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important part of the maintenance schedule. When the nozzles are removed it is a great time for your maintenance provider to stick a borescope into the engine to look around. What if they see converging cracks in a stator? Excessive corrosion? Liner rubbing? You guessed it...the engine will come off and get sent to the engine shop, and the costs will shock you.
So, the key to operating a turbine cheaply is to avoid “turbine stupid” and avoid sending your engine to the engine shop. Do all the routine maintenance required. Don’t hot start or over-torque your engine. Let nothing but air enter the front air scoop, and be sure to conduct engine washes regularly. If you can avoid the engine shop, you’ll have a (relatively) inexpensive ownership experience for your turbine.
This is completely different than a piston experience. If you treat your piston poorly, you might have to conduct a top overhaul ($25,000 to 30,000 for a big Continental or Lycom- ing). A complete exhaust system will ping you for $15,000. But, none of these numbers are comparable to the financial obscenity of turbine stupid tax. I’ve had piston owners sing the blues about an unexpected top overhaul. Those same owners would cry a river at a $200,000 hot start event.
My point in all of this? If you own a turbine, you need to keep a cash reserve just in case turbine stupid happens and you have to pay stupid tax. If a buyer tells me, “I think
I can stretch to buy a turbine,” I usually talk them out of it. If you buy a turbine, you need to be financially stout enough to handle a negative event.
Let’s Say You Upgrade to a Turbine
So, how can you best make the transition with wisdom? I have two big recommendations that you already know were coming. They are simple but very true: find the experts and do your homework.
There are times when you simply need an advocate, an agent, or a mentor to help you. Notwithstanding aviation, most of us understand this. When you enter the turbine world, don’t do it alone. You need to have someone on your side who knows what you don’t know and who “dances in that marketplace every day.” It is a brave new world, and you need to admit to yourself that you don’t know what you don’t know. All of your aviation experience has led you here, but it has not prepared you for the dangers that lurk in the supposed “good life” found in left seat of a turbine you own. You need a mentor, an agent, an advocate. And be prepared to pay this person well.
Aviation is a super-small world, and a person cannot make it in this world as a buyer agent (that’s what I call this service in my business) and be an idiot. Interview the field of potential buyer agents offering their services and ask them how many deals they did in the last year in the type of airplane you are hoping to purchase. Ask them
14 • TWIN & TURBINE / May 2022
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