May 2005-
Unless you’ve previously owned or flown something very much like the new airplane you’ve just acquired, getting a new airplane means you now need to get yourself up to speed from a piloting point of view.
Theoretically, it can be easier to move up along a single brand-name line of equipment so that many elements of the basic design criteria in your new airplane are similar to what you used to fly, but that isn’t always the case, either. Save for the marque on the airframe, a Piper Navajo has very little in common with a Piper Tri-Pacer, and a Cessna 414 can hardly be considered as anything beyond a very distant offspring of a Cessna 172.
When my airplane partner and I put our totally tricked-out light twin up for sale (Flyer, March 2005), we were quite pleased that the telephone began to ring just two days after the advertising became public.
One of the first calls we got was from a man in Atlanta, Ga.—Robert Blazer—who immediately scheduled a visit with our airplane a few days hence. Robert and his wife Barbara showed up at our home airfield in Florida on a pleasant winter day that had dawned with clear skies, light winds and a predicted high temperature in the low 70s.
It was a perfect day to see and evaluate what my partner and I were advertising as a very special light twin that had gone through a complete rebuilding and upgrading five years earlier. Right from the get-go, Robert and his wife liked what they saw. They stayed in town that night, came back the next morning to our ranch to negotiate and, just before lunch, signed on the bottom line.
They would buy the airplane from us as long as we had the annual inspection completed before delivery (it was due in two months) and, in addition, I would provide both Robert and his 19-year-old son Daniel with a comprehensive flight checkout and assistance with the initial delivery of the airplane to Atlanta.
Everyone shook hands and the process of ownership change and pilot checkouts began. My shop took in the airplane one week later, and seven days after that the annual inspection was completed.
Robert and Daniel arrived on a Sunday evening in their single-engine Zlin 143L (a four place, low-wing with a Lycoming O-540 engine—a sort-of big-engine Cherokee with a sliding canopy). We had dinner together, finished the paperwork, and then laid out our plan for the week-long twin checkout that had been agreed to.
Both Robert and his son were comparatively low time pilots (total flight time to date for the 56-year-old Robert, who first soloed five years earlier, was 650 hours. Robert had 220 hours total flight time, most of it in the family Zlin).
Both father and son had instrument and multi-engine ratings, with Robert’s twin time logged at 50 hours (mostly in a Beech Duchess), and Daniel with about 10 hours in a Piper Seminole. Although I had been a flight instructor for many, many years, I stressed that I hadn’t kept my certificate active for quite some time now, so what I would be doing would be more along the lines of cockpit familiarization than actual flight training.
Since both of these pilots were perfectly legal to take the keys to their new airplane and fly off without me saying a single word about their new machine, our agreement was for me to provide several days of “cockpit overview”—an extra bit of familiarization far above and beyond any government requirements.
We began flying Monday morning, with me talking each of them through the rather thorough checklists with which I had outfitted the airplane. Since the airframe had been jammed with modern electronics and quite a number of FAA-approved alterations to the panel and the onboard systems, the checkout was about the particular nuances in this particular airframe.
Father and son each took a turn in the left seat, with the other sitting in row two and carefully watching and listening when it wasn’t their turn to steer. Takeoffs, climbs, descents, operation of gear and flaps and landings were covered on that first day, and by the time we had gone through a few tanks of avgas, each of them were capable of getting their new twin up and down safely.
Because of the complexity of the instrument panel (a Garmin 530/430 combo, a Bendix/King 850 MFD with uplink weather, a Century 2000 autopilot and flight director, an Insight TAS 1000 air data computer, a Ryan 9900 TCAD—to name just a few of the things that these pilots needed to deal with), much of their initial exposure revolved around learning the cockpit flow patterns that I had devised, and becoming conversant with the printed checklists that backed up those flow patterns.
Day Two was more of the same, with the addition of a couple of flights with my partner in the right seat to provide them with a different set of eyes toward the how’s and why’s of what they were doing.
By Day Three we were ready for the cross-country portion of the post-sale checkout. Son Daniel left Florida in the Zlin while Robert and I got his new twin ready for his first cross-country jaunt. My wife Sharon was part of the operation, too, and the three of us departed on an IFR clearance to Atlanta.
Since Robert was qualified and current with IFR skills, I took over the task of working the radios from the copilot’s seat so he could concentrate totally on steering his new airframe and understanding the logic behind the checklists and the system operation techniques that I had recommended.
Two hours later we touched down at Dekalb/Peachtree airport and then headed for his nearby home where Sharon and I would be house guests for the next three days. Drinks, dinner and lots of airplane talk was how we wrapped up that first day in Atlanta.
It was about this time that I asked Robert about his personal twin-hunting history. He told me that he had been thinking seriously about a light twin soon after he initially got his Private license and had been investigating the possibilities ever since. He had called on, looked at and taken demo rides in a number of airplanes—all brands, all types—for the past couple of years, but hadn’t seen anything that really felt right to him.
He was looking for an airplane for two purposes: one, to take the family back and forth from Atlanta to their vacation home in Pensacola, Fla. (a 250-mile flight), and, two, to utilize their new twin in the family business. Robert Blazer is the creator and owner of the largest farmers market in the Atlanta area—the Dekalb Farmers Market in Decatur (www.dekalbfarmersmarket.com).
Begun in 1977 as a 7,500-sq-ft produce stand, the Farmers Market moved to its present large facility in the late 1980s. Currently, over 500 employees deal with keeping the endless rows stocked with everything—meats, dairy, produce, bakery, seafood, wine, flowers, to name just some of what’s available under that single roof.
Robert plans on using his new airplane to visit suppliers and make other business-related trips in the future. We had one bad weather day in Atlanta as a cold front came through with lots of wind and rain, but Friday dawned clear, breezy and cold. I provided Robert’s local flight instructor with a demonstration of what the airplane’s capabilities were while Robert watched from the back seat. After that, Robert and I flew together a little more while I showed him a few more things, then we called it a day.
Saturday was our return to Florida trip. At my suggestion, both Robert and his son had signed up for a two-day simulator course at the SIMCOM training facility in Orlando, to provide them both with in-depth exposure to operations of a twin during engine and system failures. Our flight south—Robert in the left seat, me in the right, Sharon and Daniel in row two—was toward the remnants of the cold front that had come through Atlanta a couple of days earlier.
By the time we were making our descent into my home field, I was talking Robert through the throes of an actual IFR approach to what turned out to be 800 overcast and two miles in rain and wind. Robert left the airplane at my partner’s hangar, rented a car and headed for a hotel near the SIMCOM facility.
Being a careful and conscientious man, Robert Blazer had insisted on far more of a checkout in his new twin than was required by anybody’s rules. Considering how complex this tricked-out airplane’s panel and systems were, taking the time to do this comprehensive checkout in his new-to-him airplane was a wise thing to do—especially considering that their aviation operations were moving from one engine to two.
If there is any question in your mind about the new airplane you’re about to acquire, then negotiating this sort of comprehensive initial checkout into the deal can be a really smart addition to the bottom line.
Editor-at-large Thomas Block has flown nearly 30,000 hours since his first hour of dual in 1959. In addition to his 36-year career as a US Airways pilot, he has been an aviation magazine writer since 1969, a best-selling novelist. He owns an L-19 Birddog, which he contends is a straight cross between a Piper Super Cub and a high-wing Cessna taildragger.
