Waypoints

After a dozen years of marriage, I can easily tell my wife's mood and demeanor at any particular moment. This day, as we sat side by side in the car dealer's finance office, I knew that the man in front of us wearing the ostentatious diamond ring and polyester pants was about to lose the top of his head if he didn't placate her soon. Brenda's Irish blood flushed her cheeks as she twisted in her seat and checked her watch for the twentieth time since we had arrived 90 minutes earlier. Her lunch hour was long since over.

The appointment to finish signing the papers was to take "just a few minutes," since we had supposedly completed most of the paperwork a couple of days earlier. A few signatures and then we could drive off the lot in our new purchase, the smiling salesman had assured. "We'll have everything ready for you."

Meanwhile, the diamond-studded finance guy, his fate unknown to him, stretched his arms beyond his rounded belly and slowly tapped away on a computer. Occasionally he would strike a key that brought the dot-matrix printer next to him to life, causing it to chatter out another form. He would casually reach over and tear off the form, all the while pulling his shirttail out a little farther, exposing his bare girth a bit more. I could without guilt enjoy the scene that I knew would ensue, because I had warned him 30 minutes earlier that we really needed to get this thing wrapped up.

I estimated that he had about another 90 seconds to live when he finally whirled around in his vinyl swivel chair and placed before us a stack of documents to sign. "This will only take a minute," he said with a smile as he handed us each pens.

"That's what the sales guy said two hours ago," Brenda quipped, letting the guy off easily in order to speed up the process. She really is mellowing.

By the time we drove off the lot, I estimated we had spent about eight hours of our time over two days, finalizing the deal. The ill-fated "closing" obviously took far longer than we had expected.

I contrasted that to the three airplane purchases in which I've been involved in the last four years. None of those has gone smoothly either.

My first aircraft purchase experience involved the 1984 Beech A36 Bonanza that AOPA purchased in 1991. Many of the photos you see in this magazine are taken from that airplane; it's also the one we have used for test programs with the FAA for nonprecision and precision GPS approaches. We bought the Bonanza from a dealer in Mississippi who had purchased it in Florida.

Part of our purchase procedure included a title search, for which we used — not surprisingly — the AOPA Title and Escrow Service in Oklahoma City. The search of the FAA's records showed no liens against the airplane, but it did show that all was not quite right with the paperwork, either. It seems that in 1989 a previous owner had executed a security agreement with a Biloxi, Mississippi, bank under the name of Destin Professional Consultants, Inc. However, the reverse side of the document showed the name of the debtor as Professional Consultants, Inc., with no mention of "Destin." The FAA had returned the form to the bank to have the discrepancy cleared up but had never received the corrected form back.

The AOPA Title and Escrow staff contacted the bank, and within a few days the bank officers had executed a "Disclaimer of Interest," which cleared up the file. It's the little things that can get you.

Paperwork glitches slowed my two other aircraft purchases, as well.

In early 1993 we made a deal with an individual for the purchase of N13057, the 1974 Cessna 172M that we refurbished and made into N172GN, our 1993 sweepstakes airplane dubbed the Good as New 172.

In that case, the AOPA title search staff discovered that a long-since-repaid loan had not been cleared from the records by the bank. In addition, a simple typo on a previous bill of sale forced the staff to track down one of the airplane's previous owners. At one point on the bill of sale, the seller's middle initial was "D." At another point it was (incorrectly) "J." This "discrepancy in the chain of ownership" resulted in a records search of near-Whitewater proportions. Ultimately, the previous owner was located and he agreed to sign a document correcting the previous bill of sale.

The airplane destined to become our 1994 sweepstakes prize, the Better Than New 172, faced similar document inconsistencies. That 1978 172N was purchased in 1979 by an owner operating under the corporate name of M&P Flying, Incorporated. In 1982, the documents showed the airplane's having been sold by M&P, Incorporated. Again, a missing word — Flying — meant the airplane didn't have a clear title.

I took it on as personal challenge to find the previous owners and to set the record straight. After a few dozen telephone calls to Bowbells, North Dakota, where M&P Flying once existed — and to Duluth, Minnesota, where the principals later lived — I managed to track down the previous owners and get them to sign an amendment to the bill of sale, clearing the title.

If my small number of experiences extrapolates well to the rest of the population, the FAA's files are fraught with incorrect information. Without a clear title, the true ownership of an airplane can be legally challenged and future sales can be more difficult.

No doubt about it, purchasing an automobile or an airplane can be a frustrating experience. But both can be rewarding, too. We've had a good time figuring out all the technical marvels of our new vehicle as compared to those of the slightly older similar model we traded. In just a couple of model years, the manufacturer has vastly improved the vehicle's safety and performance.

These days, every lever you move and every knob you turn in a new automobile shuttles some electrons around. Turn on the rear window defroster and you also activate the windshield-wiper deicers and the external mirror defoggers. Touch the brake pedal and you no longer pressurize the brake lines. Instead, a flurry of electrons checks each wheel's speed and decides how much braking power ought to be applied to each to keep from skidding. All of this technology is wrapped in a sleek new skin that looks far different from the older version. Underneath, though, many of the drive train and chassis components remain from the earlier models.

Pilots often bemoan the fact that aircraft manufacturers haven't kept pace with the auto companies when it comes to adopting new technology. The airplanes of today look about like those produced decades ago. Looks can be deceiving, however, as Senior Editor Marc Cook points out in this month's cover story on the fiftieth anniversary of the first flight of the Beech V-tail Bonanza. From the outside, the 1947 production model looks much like the last V-tail built in 1982 and a lot like the F33As — sans the split tail feathers — that Beech/Raytheon has rolled out of Plant 2 in Wichita for years. Inside, though, the modern airplanes share little with the pioneer aircraft. The new variants bring greatly improved systems, structures, comfort, and safety.

Ask the owner of an early Cessna 210 how much he would give to trade the cantankerous landing gear system on his airplane for the simple and effective one from a late model 210. Piper has done a tremendous job of updating its older airplanes with aerodynamic tweaks that improve performance. Inside, the interiors rate up there with those from luxury automobiles. Likewise, Mooney has continuously upgraded the powerplants in its models and introduced comfortable new interiors.

It's too bad that the airplane manufacturers are held hostage to the extra laws of physics that come from operating in the third dimension, restrictions that auto manufacturers can ignore. Just as stifling as mother nature are federally imposed certification standards that make it impractical (and often financially impossible) for airframers to update their products frequently.

Nonetheless, few personal possessions compare to an aircraft. Our new car will look old before its loan is paid off, and already half a dozen like it have shown up in the neighborhood. An airplane — now that's something to have.