Hmmm 
Not cheap to operate, but still.
After catch up maintenance, avionics upgrading seems to be the second biggest money pit, when buying a plane.
The suggested TB20 is pretty well equipped and with double horizon, double altitude, EDM and GAMIs comes with more than some of the more expensive ones.
Plus 600hrs left on the engine.
Good starting point for a negotiation, if someone looks for a capable travel tourer. And yes, it is a real 4 seater.
Not cheap to operate, I can confirm ;-)
But the speed & short field performance allows for many interesting weekend trips with fuel costs under 100€/hr.
A friend who had a Yak 52 and now shares an SF 260 with another guy says that the problem with Yaks is that by the time they are ready to fly you are too tired to fly them. That goes for both maintenance and pre-flight preparation. They were made for an environment in which there were lots of non-flying ‘people’.
Lots of Yaks here regardless because they’re cheap, often seen flying in groups, and they’re fun to watch.
@Silvaire am I right that the thinking man’s Yak is the Nanchang CJ-6?
I’m led to believe the Nanchang is considerably faster on less power but it does not have the same aerobatic capability (most of the people locally use the Yaks as ACM toys, going out in groups, flying formation and chasing each other around).
I have a friend in the USA who has had a Nangchang CJ6 for probably 20 years now. I got to fly it a handful of times, very enjoyable. But there’s quite a lot of pre-flight prep.
I was pretty tempted by a Yak 52 when I moved here from Texas, but rather more sensibly used the money as the downpayment for my house :-) and ended up with the Auster instead (which is a much more practical machine).
We have a YAK-18T in our club. There is nothing extraordinary in preflight preparations, expect opening the drain valve and rotating prop before starting to remove any oil from lower cylinders.. I would say 15min from removing the covers to “ready to take off” is realistic.
Also, the running costs are not too bad- 45L mogas per hour on circuit.
ivark wrote:
There is nothing extraordinary in preflight preparations, expect opening the drain valve and rotating prop before starting to remove any oil from lower cylinders.. I would say 15min from removing the covers to “ready to take off” is realistic.
Assuming the 50 bar pressure pneumatic starting system is leak free and has the residual pressure needed for startup, or at least close enough that you don’t have to haul a nitrogen cylinder out to the plane for a recharge. Getting the system to that level sometimes takes a bit of work, or so I’m told.
And so on.
If the pneumatic system leaks, whose fault is it?
Sigh. An unreliable pneumatic system can result from any number of sources other than owner neglect: deficient design or quality, poor parts availability, design intent that does not include days to weeks of down time as with an individual owner, the plane not having been rebuilt completely since being shipped from Russia where maintenance was not so fantastic, reliance on an intrinsically wear prone high pressure air pump to quickly recharge the system after startup and so on.
The Russians often designed systems around constraints completely different than we might assume, very low temperatures created a unique preference for pneumatics over hydraulics and their electrical technology was different, for example DC-AC conversion being done with a rotating machine versus power electronics. The fault tolerance of Russian stuff is actually well engineered, but no private ownership and lots of cheap labor was a key factor in design selection and operating procedures.
All of the above sometimes makes for a labor intensive ownership experience.
