Making a Choice

Choosing which aircraft to buy is one of the hardest decisions I have had to make.  And those who know me well, know how slow I am at making any sort of decision.  The decision on the purchase of a mobile phone plan has been known to take me 3 weeks of research.

I have been flying for about 3 years and amassed a total of 260 hours taking my lovely wife and our friends on day trips and long journeys.  The planes I have flown are the classic general aviation aircraft.  Cessna's 152, 172 and 182 and Piper Arrow.

A lot of those journeys have been two up but plenty of them have been four up.  Now, I am a big unit and most of my friends are pretty big.  In small planes, big isn't ideal.  Thank goodness that Wifey is small. 

The plane we have done most of our long journeys in is a Piper Arrow (VH-PRF) which we have rented from Warnervale Air which is where I learned to fly.  PRF has been very good to us but of recent times she has been out of action.  She's also a little on the small side.  You can't really fly her 4 up at all.

So when going 4 up, I have been taking a Cessna 182.  But even it can't carry 4 up with baggage and full fuel.

So when I started looking at planes, the criteria I set for myself was the ability to take at least 4 with a reasonable amount of fuel and preferably be able to add a kid or two.   This lead me to looking at:

Cessna 182
Cessna 206
Cessna 210
Cirrus SR22
Piper Saratoga
Beechcraft Bonanza

Each had their advantages.  It has been long said that all planes are compromises.  I completely concur.

The other decision-making criteria I set for myself was the balance between new vs old.  I debated this subject online with the professional pilots rumour network (see it here:  http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-473717.html).  In the end, I decided that I would make a larger investment and buy something newer.

So the 182 gave the newest bang for the budget buck.  The 206 is expensive for newish ones and the 210's are all older.  And on top of all of this, Wifey prefers the ride in the low wing rather than high wings.  So in the end the Cessna's all got ruled out.

The Cirrus was greatly tempting with fantastic speed for reasonable fuel consumption.   In the end, I decided against it.  Call me old fashioned but the aluminium of the Cessna-Piper'Beechraft planes just gives me a sense of ease of workability that the composites don´t offer.  Plus, only 4 seats.
So that left the Saratoga and the Bonanza both of which have the benefit of 6 seat possibilities.  The debate raged in my mind for many months.  In the end, the advantage of the Saratoga is better luggage space, large fuel tanks, and slightly cheaper upfront costs (and debatebly, maintenance costs).  The loading is easier in a Saratoga as well. 

So then I sweated the decision over many months and finally EC-JIA turned up.