I am trying to get in contact with the ex owner of M20C Ranger once registered as D-EEBR. I think the plane had a gear up landing and was later purchased by an Hungarian gentleman who registered the aircraft in Hungary. As new owner says not to have old logbooks I would like to understand better the history of the aircraft as I am a potential buyer. Thanks for your help.
I can’t help with finding the owner, but I’d been wondering why that a/c hasn’t sold for years. For a seemingly clean aircraft with freshly overhauled engine the price seems quite good.
When I first read your post I thought you might be talking about my Mooney which was also a D- reg, gear up, then HA- reg!
I am trying to understand that as well and I’ve sent you a private message….
…plane had a gear up landing…new owner says not to have old logbooks…
What else do you need to know?
For example I need to know what things were damaged during the gear up and how many hours did the airplane have when it was sold and why it was sold without docs…..
Hmmm… @Peter, please recommend an Emoji that I could have added to my earlier post to make my message clearer… 
I think the aircraft is both cheap precisely because of the above, and if it were easy to obtain the records the value would go up and the owner would probably have done it. owners who don”t really want to sell normally price high, not low.
Still worth trying, though, doesn’t cost much.
It is possible to buy a plane with that sort of “history” and get a good one, but
It isn’t a project for a novice.
To make things worse, you can pay 1k+ for a prebuy by an apparently qualified “engineer” and the prebuy can still be totally inadequate. I’ve seen some cases of this… as I often say, GA ownership is not a good arena for a novice.
Ignore the above at your peril (many have – I have countless emails).
Is it this one you are talking about?
http://www.planecheck.com?ent=da&id=27932 local copy
I recall one guy here on the forum sending a mechanic to look at it after which he lost interest.
But you only know for sure after you see for yourself or rather have a Mooney qualified mechanic do a thorough prebuy.
@Peter The usual chicken and egg question… how do you graduate from being a novice if you are being told in all the forums that as a novice you should shy away from ownership….
The usual chicken and egg question… how do you graduate from being a novice if you are being told in all the forums that as a novice you should shy away from ownership….
I think people need to ask around publicly for a recommendation for the prebuy guy. The problem is that most people want to do this privately, for various reasons. I can obviously understand not revealing the exact plane you want to be looked at.
We have done this before, as you say. Other factors which come into play is e.g. that a lot of people fall in love with a plane (maybe the colour?) and they will buy it eventually, prebuy or not.
I have finally found a way to make local PDF copies of Planecheck etc ads without spending half a day. A couple of screenshots, and the full version of acrobat combined the jpegs. Then upload. It is quite curious that they don’t just print in a useful way – probably intentional.
Well, I don‘t know a huge amount about this one, but a little.
Until it‘s apparent gear-up event (which I can‘t find any report of, interestingly), D-EEBR was for a few years part of the fleet of some (in)famous aeroclub in the Munich area. This one..
You might want to contact them to find out more.
I once considered renting it for a trip, but then didn‘t proceed. It‘s a (rare) late production C model and I remember from the photos it didn‘t look bad inside and out. Had an STEC autopilot.
Before that, it used to be HB-DWH. That‘s a positive. Swiss registered aircraft tend to get well taken care of. Maybe @MooneyDriver knows or can find out a bit more.
Generally (not from any direct experiences) I am not too fond of HA-registered aircraft. It serms a bit like Hungary collects most of the crashed small aircraft from Central Europe these days. They then get fixed up some way and then appear on the European market again, usually with very outdated avionics.
If the price is 25k, then one might as well risk it anf buy it. Problem is, the seller will probably want something more like 45k or so…
