I’d say the trip is off to a bad start when you pull the cover off the airplane and slide into the cabin only to find holes in the panel and a bunch of empty mounting racks in the radio stack. After a few seconds the sickening reality sinks in: Somebody lifted your high-priced avionics. That’s a tale of woe from a Mooney owner at a big-city airport, and I’ve talked to plenty others who lost avionics and portable gadgets in otherwise sleepy backwoods airfields. This is hardly a new problem. Thieves have targeted aircraft electronics for as long as I can remember.
In fact when I was a green avionics guy in the late 1980s the problem was so widespread that every radio we pulled from a stack was checked against the serial numbers logged in the maintenance records, and also against a stolen avionics database. In those days the flagship radio—and a hot number on the black market—was the King KX170B navcomm. These old radios have a thin tin data identification tag affixed (essentially glued) to the rear chassis. It wasn’t uncommon to pull the radios and find that someone switched the tags, a shell game that made it impossible to keep track of which radio belonged to a given aircraft. Some radios had no tags at all, technically making them unairworthy per published specs. These days the hot numbers are Garmin GNS and GTN navigators.