Looking For A New Airplane

It’s Gotten Complicated

- Dick Karl

The obnoxious part should be pretty obvious. I’ve been privileged to make a good living as a cancer surgeon, had the good luck to fly jets for three years for a Part 135 company in my late 60s and I’ve got a supportive wife, Cathy. I am acutely aware that this state of affairs is not common and that I am lucky.

Longtime readers will know that Cathy and I sold our Piper Cheyenne in July 2017, with the intent of buying a jet to enjoy for a few years before the actuarial tables catch up with me. I couldn’t wait to take the money from the Cheyenne, add to it and buy a jet. I have been dreaming of owning a jet since I had a model of a Lear 24 on my desk while in medical school in 1966.

What to buy? I had assumed the Cessna CJ1 would be a good fit. I was already typed in the CE-525 by virtue of my CJ3 job at JetSuite. Not only that, but I was single-pilot certified. I was familiar with the cockpit, its layout and the airplane’s systems. It would be like coming home.

I was surprised to learn that used CJ1s are selling for about 20 percent more than I had expected. They also mostly featured a polyglot of avionics. The Collins Pro Line 21 was pretty much standard, but the flight management systems varied. If the airplane didn’t have a second GPS, it wasn’t WAAS certified. All this gave me pause. A lot of money was involved.