Editor's Note from 2007: prices have naturally gone up since
this was written, but not as much as you'd think. This group
of airplanes still represents a huge bang for the buck. Add
15%-25% to the prices here and you'll have it covered. Enjoy!
Any of us who have been around aviation for than a couple of
years have read, written, heard-about or contributed to a dozen
articles in the vein of “…The Best Airplanes Under
(Insert your favorite number here).” It doesn’t seem
that long ago that the goal was to identify the best airplanes
under $2,000. No, really! In the ‘60’s and ‘70’s
you could buy a lot of airplanes for less than that.
This time around we thought we’d try a different approach:
rather than set a specific limit, we’d cut right to the
bottom line and try to find the cheapest airplanes available.
We laid down no limitations. If it was a real airplane (no ultralights)
and was flyable, we put it in the list.
We had to rely on Trade-a-Plane and a couple weekends of airport
cruising to come up with real-world, low-buck pricing rather
than the Aviation Blue Book because some of the airplanes we
were looking for were either so old or so cheap that the normal
reference guides did carry information on them.
How Low Can You Go?
You’re probably wondering what surfaced as the cheapest
airplane. Bear in mind that we didn’t count anything but
an airplane that was licensed and flying. No derelicts allowed.
The absolute cheapest was a Bower’s Fly Baby homebuilt at
an asking price of $7900.
1980 Bowers Fly Baby, 705 TTAF, 705 SMOH,
65 hp Continental, metal prop, sliding canopy,
flies good, has heat, yellow. Lost Job. $7900.
In the pictures it is a good-looking airplane and, since it has
700 hours on it that means it’s a good flying airplane.
Airplanes that don’t fly well don’t accumulate flying
time. 700 hours also means you’re not likely to live long
enough to use up it’s remaining engine life.
The cheapest certified airplane was an Ercoupe at $10,500
Ercoupe, 415C/D, 85 hp, metal wings, Bubble windshield,
hail dimples, all AD’s complied, TT2180, SMOH 830, $10,500
takes all.
Hail dimples! That’s why the airplane is a solid $4,000
less than most of its brethren. But at ten-grand, who cares?
It should be mentioned that when we were airport cruising we
found a number of certified airplanes that were priced less then
$10,000. There are always some local airplanes for sale that
never find their way into Trade-a-Plane. Some of these can be
real deals. We ran across a fellow who had been badgering a long
time owner to part with a Luscombe 8A he’d had staked down
on his farm for a million years. The old guy finally sold it
for $8500. It had a 500-hour engine plus it had the original
aluminum wheel pants on it that are worth a small fortune by
themselves.
Regional bargains pop up all the time but fortune favors he who
regularly haunts all the small, local airports.
What Makes Them Cheap
There are a number of factors that drive an airplane’s value
into the basement. They are:
• Condition – Beat-up
airplanes will always be at the bottom of the stack.
• High Time engine – With
an engine that’s within a couple hundred hours of TBO, an
airplane is likely to be an orphan until the price is low enough.
• Un-popular type – Some
airplanes just never made it in the popularity contest. Usually
this is because it doesn’t fly very well but the result
is that the market never supported it so relatively few were
built. They may be rare, but they fly like toads, so the price
stays low.
• Bad reputation – A
few airplanes, the Luscombe being the prime example, are still
relatively cheap because they somehow earned a bad reputation.
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