A motorcycling buddy and I amuse ourselves with weekend rides to backwoods airfields to see how many abandoned aircraft we can find. Boneyard rides. We found a lot of basket cases this past riding season. A shame that what might be good airplanes—Cessna 150s, V-tail Bonanzas, J-model Mooneys (and yes, a North American Navion serving duty as a landscape planter)—are left in the weeds to rot, while owners still send in their checks for the tiedown fees. I guess some things are just tough to part with. Don’t tell the spouses, but after seeing all these planes we’re thinking this could be a good time to make a smoking deal and pull the trigger on an airplane partnership, especially with all the cheap money banks are lending for aircraft. But after running some numbers and talking with aircraft appraisers, we’re holding short with the checkbooks.
The Fall 2020 Aircraft Bluebook (a starting point for shopping the market) suggests that a 1975 Cessna 172M retails for $60,000, as an average. It assumes the 150-HP Lycoming O-320-E2D is within 1000 hours of a major overhaul and the cylinders are within 85 percent compression, and the airplane is within six months of a fresh annual, has average airframe time, good paint and interior, original logs and no damage history. The equipage specs in the Bluebook show it pretty much as it came off the line in 1975, with dual navcomms, a transponder and an ADF (yes, it even comes with a bar ornament). In a perfect world, all this poster child needs is a new avionics package. A modest rework with small-screen EFIS, panel navigator, two-axis autopilot, ADS-B, new antennas and a decent audio system will be a $35,000 upgrade, for starters. Sure, you can do it cheaper, but that’s a typical upgrade for a long-term keeper, at least ultimately. And that makes for a $90,000 46-year-old Skyhawk. If the O-320 tanks, an overhaul could run $25,000.