We got the Cotswold CFI, Phil Mathews to take it up for a test flight. He is a man of few words at the best of time and was succinct in his judgement – ‘It’s an Arrow 2 and flies just as I would expect’ – I am told that if you know Phil, this is probably high praise!
We crawl all over (and under) the aircraft. It really is beautifully presented with a great recent paint job and top notch avionics. Leland has clearly spent a small fortune on it in the last two years. I mentioned the lovely ‘retro’ interior until he pointed out that these were the original seats – dating from 1971, I was impressed at the condition. But I guess it does make sense given the very modest 2600 hours that the aircraft has done since 1971.
The only potential ‘gotcha’s’ we can see is that we will need a good ‘panels off’ structural inspection (but would not expect to find anything) and the engine is past TBO and therefore being run ‘on condition’ and could therefore need replacing / zero timing at any time. This appears to be reflected in the asking price.
It turns out that Leland is fluent in French, so he and my French Canadian neighbour wander off gabbling away and waving their arms while we as a group form a circle and look at our shoes.
The upshot is that we won’t try to muck about on the price and offer him the full asking price with a deposit now and the balance payable on the conclusion of a full engineering report with satisfactory results and view of logs if we can get the aircraft back to Gloucester for Aeros to take a look.
Leland is happy with this and now we need to come up with a few dates and make arrangements to drive the logs separately or something. Hopefully this can happen in a week or two at the outside.
So with luck, I will soon be back into group flying at a far more reasonable £70 an hour zipping around at 130 – 135 knots!
