Search and Repo: “OMG!”

As we taxied out, I became conscious of a grin on my face. I’d have to go back to junior year of high school to remember the last time I was this giddy about my “new” ride. The object of my affection back then was a two-door 1967 Buick LeSabre passed down four times by older siblings. The white whale of a car arrived just in time for prom.

Today’s grin was of a similar vintage: a 1975 Piper Cheyenne that changed hands more times than the ol’ Buick. Under that hood was an oil-thirsty V8. Under these cowls were a pair of PT6’s freshly returned to service. Cheyenne trainer Bob Pinto and I were readying for take-off – the airplane’s first flight in nine years. Jet A is unavailable at N30, so Mike Lovelace of TML Aircraft dedicated 55-gallon drums and a pickup truck to the task. Two hundred seventy-five gallons of hand-pumped kerosene later, leaving N30 finally became possible.

We performed the pre-takeoff checklist with a cold, Pennsylvania winter breeze blowing right down the pike and 1,240 horses churning a pair of black, scimitar four-blades. The old car had been nicknamed “Moby Dick,” and it had soul. Would N770MG be the same? We were about to find out.

Patience & Reconnaissance
Forty-two years is a long time between grins. No offense to the Navajo or Twinco before “0MG,” but getting back to the flight levels and out from under the avgas sword of Damocles became a priority. Okay, maybe an obsession. There may be another way to cruise 250 knots at FL250 with a useful load of 4,000 pounds for $350,000, but in 20 years of searching, I’ve yet to find it. For me, all roads led to the PA-31T. Finding the right one, ah, now there’s the rub.

Tracking Controller and Trade-a-Plane was a necessary discipline in scouring for value propositions, but if the numbers are right, they won’t stay on the market long. A fair number of airplanes change hands without ever making it to the listing stage. For me, checking the listings nightly gave a therapeutic outlet to my obsessing. It also helped cultivate an organic feel for the fleet, from typical times 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, I hope she puts a smile on the faces of my wife, Christine, and our three daughters. But when she’s not, OMG will be free to haul medicines and clinicians to Haiti, supplies to disaster sites, and wounded U.S. veterans and their families to their destinations (veteransairlift.org).

Back in the Air
Before any of that good stuff can occur, this machine has to get off the ground. For runway, Bob and I had about 2,800 feet. Any doubts about thrust were dispelled by a call from Mike DeVader of Prime Turbines two days earlier (we’ll call him Mike 2.) Mike 2 was the guy who parachuted into N30 to trim in the engines after installing new containment rings, combustion liners, nozzles and overhauled fuel components in compliance with a 2014 AD. Now, he needed to test out full power. But with only 55 gallons of Jet A weighing her down, Mike 1 and Mike 2 had to tie the airplane to a dump truck just to keep her from jumping brakes.

“Don’t worry,” Mike 1 shouted over the dump truck’s rumble. Mike 1 had been an Air Force F-100 crew chief back in his early days. He knew something about thrusty birds. “We had to tie them by the tail all the time,” he said as he wrapped a come-along from truck to tail. “Only ever tore one off.”

Later, it was our turn to hold brakes.

“Remember, if anything goes wrong, stand on the left rudder pedal,” the voice of Cheyenne owner Steve Riggs chided us over the radio. Taking the bait, we replied, “Why the left?”

“Because I’m on your right!” Steve laughed.

Time to pay attention. Throttles up, Bob held them long enough for us to get an encouraging scan down the twin column of dials. “Airspeed’s alive,” I heard myself say. “Seventy…90…100.” And just like that, we were off, trees getting small. “Positive rate, gear tracking.” Then, whoops, a red “Gear Unsafe” light. The grin faded.

“Gear doors,” Bob said. “They didn’t close.” He held up the gear handle for a few extra seconds waiting for the reassuring clunk to accompany the light going out. It came. “Gears up and locked. Let’s hope not permanently.”

Between the all-black instrument panel with its big overhanging glare shield and the late afternoon overcast layer, it was none too bright in the cockpit. “Post lights and dial lights are out, too. The circuit breakers popped. A reset and it pops again.”

Prepared for this, we looked like a couple of repo guys ourselves, me with a miner’s light over my headset and Bob with a handheld to illuminate the dials. “Make sure you get the new panel painted white or something light,” Bob said.

Leveling off at just 5,500 feet for the shakedown run to Bob’s shop and initial training at N81, I jotted squawks on my kneeboard. Overall, a few snakes slithered out of the 9-year-old woodpile, but the annunciator lights mostly kept to themselves. When it came time to drop the wheels, they fell out of the wells, a disconcertingly fast three green. The gear doors were marching to the beat of a different sequence; we’d figure it out on the ground.

Helped along by both popular Cheyenne mods (streamlined exhaust stacks and optimized ram air intakes), 0MG was not slow. The airplane that sat still for so long zipped along at 215 knots, 1,900 RPM, lots of torque and temp to spare. Fuel flow? Ah well, let’s not spoil the moment.
My prom date was home before curfew as my facial muscles started to give out. There is something about these soulful old machines that make a guy grin.