Funny stuff reading your posts here. I am an FAA DAR/A&P/IA. Grew up around airplanes and owned 3 FAA Repair Stations until I sold them in Sep 2016. My Dad had a C310 and a 182 growing up in AZ. Now I just do imports/exports and recurrents to support my HD and truck toys. I just did a recurrent on a Beech Staggerwing coming back here from Canada. What a beautiful piece of machinery. Tastefully restored with a fresh OH on the R985 and a new interior. The airframe only has 2800 hours total time so the airplane is in great condition. The guy that bought it paid a fortune for it.
Fly safely. Remember-once the smoke clears the lawyers go after the paper. Keep good records.
I always go to the Staggerwings at Oshkosh. What a plane!
I'm familiar with the program. Everyone who ever laid eyes on the plane gets to get involved. We had a guy with a Cherokee 140 wanting to get a Mooney in the worst way. There was one on the field that was for sale but we warned him to get a prebuy inspection on it because the guy who owned it was a bit sketchy. The owner was an A&P,IA for one of the airlines and did his own maintenance.
To make a long story short, the guy buying said he wanted to come over when he was doing the annual, the owner agrees and then calls him and says it's done, come and get it. The buyer brings his instructor to get checked out in it and off they go. I see them doing pattern work for a while and then they land and I can see the plane parked out on the runway so I assume the owner is getting debriefed or something. Next thing I know he's walking up to the hangar say he ****** up.
He had a gear up landing 2 hours into owning the thing with an instructor sitting next to him. We brought the plane into the shop and put it up on jack to swing the gear and check for the gear warning horn. Surprisingly enough it didn't work. And the more we got into the plane the more obvious it became why the previous owner didn't want him hanging around for the annual. That top baffle that covers the top of the engine hadn't been off in years along with a bunch of other stuff. Most of the inspection covers hadn't been off in a very long time. The thing was a disaster mechanically.
The IA told the previous owner that the gear warning horn didn't work and he figured the right thing to do was work something out with the new owner and he gets indignant about being called out for being a poor mechanic. He said the horn worked when he tested it but the wire was unhooked to it when we finally tracked down why it didn't work.
There were a lot of reasons that plane landed gear up and the previous owner got really lucky no one was hurt and the new guy didn't sue him and the instructor. I would have at least punched the instructor in the face on my way out the door.
