By Cal Ziegler, The Inspector (A&P/IA)

Editor’s Note: Although Carl is chronicling the purchase of a Cessna 172, his observations on this journey also apply to purchasing a Piper.

Do you have the urge to buy or upgrade your current magic carpet? This is my two-and-a-half-year quest to locate a 172 that was purchase worthy. Having a maintenance background does not necessarily make it easier to find an air­craft suitable for purchase. Previously I had been flying a 1966 Alon Aircoupe and absolutely loved that little airplane, but it was time to upgrade to something a little more comfortable, one with two doors for ease of in and out. Especially important when you start hitting the senior ages. I should mention that I learned to fly in the Cessna 150 and the 172 series.

What I Found

Observation Number One: There is rarely an airplane available in your immediate area.
The necessity to travel becomes an important requirement when you’re shopping for an aircraft. The alternative? Have someone you trust lay eyes on any prospect. I was very for­tunate to be working for an airline which allowed me the freedom to travel on a standby basis without the restrictive cost of buying a last-minute ticket. Carol would also be go­ing with me on a majority of the junkets, as these aircraft were scattered across the country. In a nutshell, I looked at 26 airplanes from the Midwest down to Orlando and out to the coasts of Oregon and Seattle.

Observation Number Two: Just like shopping for a used car, owners would ask market value for an aircraft that I swear had never seen a vacuum cleaner or a spray of Windex.
It was apparent that teenagers must have been living in some of these planes for the last month or so. The exceptions would be the aircraft that dealers were marketing or aircraft that had been freshly updated or painted. Unfortunately, those aircraft were a very small percentage .

Observation Number Three (from Carol): Many owners seemed totally unaware of the actual condition of their airplane.
That becomes painfully obvious when you look at the exact same model of aircraft and you’re able to compare airframes, with the only variable being maintenance performed or should I say not performed.

Observation Number Four: Not one seller, in all of my trav­els, ever asked what I did for a living.
This was one of the most perplexing observations. If you note my bio, you’ll see that I have an IA rating, with more than a couple years of experience. This is in conjunction to working full-time as an aircraft inspector at a major airline. Get this, I never indicated my experience level with airplanes or my main­tenance background in aviation. When I discovered issues, I would very casually, but sternly, point out airworthiness issues on their aircraft and encouraged the owner to have their me­chanic take a better look (or second look) at a noted discrep­ancy. After viewing the first couple of airplanes this almost be­came a joke between Carol and I as to whether or not somebody would ever quiz me on my background.

Sadly, and stunningly, some of the issues uncovered in my walk around pre-purchase inspections would be considered grounding issues, apparently unknown to the present owner. A few of these aircraft recently had their annual inspections.

Enjoy and learn from the brief stories on a few of the 26 air­craft that we looked at across the United States. I ended up pur­chasing number 26 in the summer of 2018.

Airplane #1

Lesson Learned: Always inspect the plane in person. Pictures don’t tell the whole story.

Location: Indianapolis area

The group selling this aircraft did a very nice job of present­ing the aircraft on the Internet. To their credit they had many photos and good information. On the trip down Carol made the comment, “Do you think this will be the airplane you might buy?” As she would soon discover, the smart shopping philoso­phy is to inspect everything in person and never rely solely on photographs. This principle would shape the rest of our shop­ping experiences.

This first aircraft was your standard 172M and supposedly had a recent repaint. It looked really good in the photographs but when I got within 10 feet it was obvious that the plane looked much better online than in person. The airplane was freshly painted, but it was painted over the old paint which was never stripped from the aircraft. The paint surface actu­ally had a tactile “texture”. I have, over my tenure in aviation, labeled this kind of paint job, “vortex inducing paint.” It’s like someone added grit to the paint but in fact it was just very poor application.

We walked up to the airplane together and Carol took one look at it and while she’s not mechanical, she knows what a good paint job is supposed to look like. I took one look at her and she knew exactly what I was thinking. I motioned for her to go hang out in the office for 10 minutes and I’ll just go through the motions of looking at it to justify the 600-mile trip. I thanked the dealer and left after spending about 20 minutes total at the airport. So much for airplane number one.

Airplane #2

Lesson Learned: Double check the logbooks.

Location: Southern Minnesota

I found a 172M on Craigslist and we stopped at the airport to take a look at this aircraft on the way back from a vacation out West. This airplane started with some potential. It had a beauti­ful repaint, standard Cessna radios, and decent times on engine and airframe. The owner did not have the logbooks handy, so I made a trip back down a week later. The owner pulls out two brand new logbooks and lays them on the table in front of me. I queried if he had any additional logbooks and he said these are the only ones that he had. I was momentarily speechless because in general, any vintage 1974 airplane should probably have a minimum of three logbooks. The owner then hit me with the bombshell: The original logbooks had been lost in a fire back in 2000 and these were the newly “reconstructed” logbooks for the aircraft. I opened the airframe log expecting to see a lengthy statement that you should expect to find when starting a new set of logbooks. The first statement in each logbook read almost exactly as follows:

Aircraft logbooks lost in fire, AD’s complied with Illegible Signature

No mechanic identification or A&P/IA number, no aircraft information, and no information that would indicate a licensed mechanic and/or owner did anything to try to legally recon­struct these logs. Even the weight and balance was on a ruled line of paper, never signed or produced by a mechanic.

Basically, none of the paperwork was usable and this aircraft was getting annual inspections on a regular basis with the IA’s apparently blind to never having a solid reference starting point to work from. After approximately 10 years of annuals, the logs show that someone finally figured out that ADs had never been complied with. This was a very clean airplane with an extremely poor pedigree. I had to pass on this one. The owner did make a point to indicate he had other prospective interested buyers, es­pecially one in Colorado, to help expedite my decision making.

Airplane #3

Lesson Learned: Is it airworthy?

Location: Iowa

This 172M owned by an older couple who used the plane for flight instruction, made for interesting viewing. The husband had just suffered a stroke and was in the process of trying to get his CFI license back. This is one of those aircraft that really needed a week-long cleaning and would have challenged even a dedicated detailer. It was also one of the first airplanes I came across that was visibly unsafe to fly.

First, it had very limited aileron travel due to poor rigging. Next, if you look at the pic­ture of the leading edge of the horizontal sta­bilizer, you’ll note that it has rubber erosion boots installed. Look closely at the erosion boot and you’ll see that the trailing edges of the boots are curled up. The curling was on the top and the bottom, basically acting as spoilers on the leading edges. I’m definitely not going to test this theory.

Note the propeller photo and the extreme gap between the spinner and the cowling which indicated either damage to the engine mount or engine mounts that look as though they had been on the aircraft since the Wright brothers. I talked to the IA that performed the annual on this aircraft and he was clueless. He did tell me he was getting ready to retire. I passed on this aircraft and tried to express the airworthiness issues to the quaint older couple.

Airplane #4

Lesson Learned: Make sure the price is right.

Location: Southern Wisconsin

This was a relatively nice 172M, but the dealer was asking way above market value at the time. This airplane had the original blood red interior that Cessna produced during the 70s as well as the original radios. It was pretty much a period “disco” air­plane. Carol took one look at the inside and her remark was priceless as she said, “Do you mean in 40 years nobody has done anything to this airplane?” Passed on this one and fortunately this trip was only a 5-hour, one-way drive.

Airplane #5

Lesson Learned: Check for corrosion.

Location: Orlando, Florida

I was hoping this aircraft would be in halfway decent condition. Boy was I wrong! There was a lot of corrosion, as well as an awful lot of creative Krylon spray paint on the bottom of the wings, most likely used to cover the spots of cor­rosion. At this point it didn’t make sense to bother looking inside the wing. It did have a nice new windshield (I can only speculate what the old one looked like).

I grabbed the control wheel and it al­most took two hands to move the ailerons. This poor plane had never seen a can of WD-40 in its lifetime. The final straw was looking at the corroded and missing riv­ets on the elevator torque tubes on the left and right sides.

They were regularly flying this plane and it had a relatively recent annual inspection. This poor airplane was a mess as well as being non-airworthy. Again, they asked market value and af­ter we got home I noticed it was off the market for over two months. I passed this one up.

Airplane #6

Lesson Learned: Check scat tubing.

Location: Central Wisconsin

This 172M had a very unique “fish skin” paint job (heavy orange peel) and again showed a lack of tender loving care. In addition, almost every one of these aircraft viewed had scat duct tubing that had been originally installed at the factory. Note the accompanying photograph to get an idea of what rotted scat tubing looks like. If yours look like the ones in the photo, please change them out. Not only are they in poor shape, but the metal windings in these even­tually rust and cause corrosion issues if they are in contact with alu­minum skins. If you own a Cessna Cardinal or a 210 and you have had your center section inspected and your scat tubing looks like this, ask your shop for an explanation of why they did not offer to change sections out. Poor condition scat tubing can cause serious issues when in contact with the spar carry through. Fortunately, we don’t tend to see this issue in most Pipers.

More than several other aircraft that Carol and I looked at around the Midwest all had the same themes of needing paint, in­terior upgrades, and radios. I was coming up on the two-and-a-half-year mark of shopping and was thinking I would never find an aircraft worthy of my time and effort. Finally, word of mouth from an acquaintance turned me on to a 1976 172N in northern Min­nesota that might be worth looking at. At least this one was within driving distance.

Airplane Search Finally Over

Lesson Learned: Take your time – it is worth the wait.

Location: Northern Minnesota

I found a 172N with an engine that had only 12 hours and the airframe time was shy of 9,000 hours. We walked into the enclosed hangar to find an aircraft totally covered in dirt. Within 15 minutes I had a tick on me. Under the dirt, the paint was in very good shape, the interior was awesome, and the tires were not flat. On the seat in the aircraft was a logbook sticker indicating a new battery had been installed. Carol heard my gasp and asked what was wrong. I said this sticker is over 4 years old and I’m looking at the tach time which hasn’t changed in over four years! This airplane had a brand new, overhauled engine and had been sitting in the hanger with break-in oil all these years. For some reason there was no fuel in the aircraft.

The logbooks and paperwork review showed completeness and consistency which was a rewarding find. Especially compared to some of the other aircraft where logbooks were very questionable. An interesting revelation was that while the logbooks were awe­some, the maintenance group’s execution of work on this plane was about 80%. “Eighty percenters,” is my new term for a mismatch of paperwork and actual aircraft condition. For example, there was $2,000 worth of new baffles installed on an overhauled engine and maintenance never took the time to actually fit and seal the baffle materials to the cowling. The missing fuel turned out to be from dried and leaking seals at the gascolator. There were no recent stains so that fuel had been gone for quite some time. I removed one cam follower from the Lycoming O-320-H2AD engine and looked inside the case with a borescope. Surprisingly the cam and followers were in excellent condition. I can chalk that up to hav­ing break in oil that was still clinging to the components after four and a half years. I personally would never have expected to see that. There was minor rust in the cylinders at the top ends, but nothing that gave me an indication that running the engine was going to do any additional damage.

The flight back to my home base was mostly uneventful, with the exception of the oil temperature sitting on the red line for the duration. Turns out that in the process of engine rebuilding and reinstalling, it must have been too much work to take the time to clean the fins on the oil cooler. The cooler luckily did not need to be flushed (an item suggested during an overhaul) but probably had 50% to 60% airflow blocked due to dirt and debris over its life­time. The previous owner had been flying it this way for the first 12 hours. Ouch!

In addition to new baffling, a new lightweight starter had been installed. Again, being 80 percenters, why would you go through the trouble of fabricating a baffle plate to cover up the new hole that was created with the installation of the smaller diameter starter.

Analysis of the spinner mismatch to the cowling showed the en­gine mount washers had not been installed in the correct locations for the serial number on this plane. Putting those in the correct locations restored the thrust line back where it was supposed to be.

After a couple of weeks attending to TLC items, the plane was in pretty good shape. One important issue I wanted to attend to was a good overhaul on the Bendix D3000 dual magneto. This was a story in itself. The maintenance shop had an individual supposedly do an overhaul on the magneto at the same time the engine was done. I had looked at the work order and while the work performed seemed plausible, I did not have a lot of confidence in an unknown person working on this model of magneto. The following spring I ordered an exchange magneto and when I opened up the existing one, I was not disappointed by my suspicions. My findings indi­cated the cam retention screw had not been changed or torqued, there were loose screws on the distributor blocks and the p-lead ca­pacitors had not been changed out. All were items that should have been addressed for the defined overhaul. Most certainly I was look­ing at an impending failure somewhere down the road. The Bendix dual magneto is actually a very good unit, but it does not tolerate poor maintenance practices. Despite the dual magnetos poor early service history, they have become a very dependable ignition sys­tem. I would like to stress that a quality overhaul from a qualified shop is the ONLY way to go with these mags whether they are on a Cessna or a Piper. They give excellent service despite the mental reminder of only having one drive!

Other TLC items were taken care of when I gutted the interior to install ADS-B equipment. These included new fuel hoses, air scat tubing, insulation, and assessing and sealing air gaps. These are common repair or upgrade items on any Cessna or Piper with de­cades of service. I would have felt like a lottery winner if I found an aircraft where someone did all the little things before accumulating 43 years of service.

Takeaways

Here are some Monty Python quest adventure takeaways of my shopping experiences. Note that I did not run engines or fly any of the aircraft that I looked at (with good reason on a few). None of these had high-end avionics or equipment that war­ranted a test flight and I am certainly familiar with how 172s are supposed to fly.

Just a Walk Around: A very thorough preflight consisting of flight control checks, gave me all the indications I needed concern­ing possible flight issues. Certainly my limited experience came in handy. Many, if not all of these aircraft needed major upgrade work including avionics, paint, and interior. Only two aircraft, including the one I purchased, actually had decent interiors and paint. My 172 interior only had 1,000 hours since install.

In today’s market, the planes for sale seem to be in worse condi­tion. I suspect sellers toss planes on the market with expectations of reaping market value without lifting a finger. Those that have up­grades are in the stratosphere on price. So much for entry level fair deals in today’s market. It goes without saying, you actually have to look at every aircraft you’re thinking of buying. I’m not talking about a full pre-purchase inspection, but get eyes on the aircraft and try to match what you see with what has been stated in the log­books or advertising. Remember there is no legally defined format for a pre-purchase inspection. If you are shopping for a Piper single, they have the advantage of large cowling doors for excellent visual access. Cessna cowls are a bit more involved, but the tops remove relatively easy with good viewing.

There are a couple of areas on both Cessna and Piper aircraft that should receive additional scrutiny: Spars

I will round out this story with one statement from a seller: When I questioned the terribly useless engine baffling on a 172 that just came out of annual he stated, “Oh, those aren’t that important.” Never heard that one before!

Carl Ziegler has close to 50 years of continuous experience working as an aircraft technician and 38 years as an IA. In addition to GA, he has acquired over 38 years of airline experience with Northwest and most recently with Delta, finishing his last 13 years of airline service as an aircraft inspector. He currently flies a 1976 Cessna 172N.