I once travelled with an engineer (who was being paid by the day) to South Africa. We were there to look at an aircraft in Lanseria.
We found several problems The seller gambled that we wouldn’t walk away having travelled around 6000 miles so they said it’s sold as is where is.
We were there for 5 days but in the end we came home, without the aircraft.
Three of us travelled from Inverness to look at a number of Robins south of London. We didn’t make an offer for any of them. Examined, and set off back. Two of us travelled Inverness to Blackpool. Same result. Same again Inverness to Bodmin, but we later agreed a price, went back, and collected it. We payed our engineer to go and look at it before buying, and saved money on work to be done before we payed, after his travel and charges.
Neil wrote:
We were there for 5 days but in the end we came home, without the aircraft.
With the proliferation of good quality digital cameras and e-mail , this really shouldn’t happen any more.
In the example of the 140 I bought, sight-un-seen, tens of thousands miles away, I DID have the seller take pictures of EVERYTHING as well as scans of all the logs and paperwork. The ONLY surprise was that there were NO surprises !
I perform a few dozen pre-buy Surveys (don’t call them “Inspections” ’cause in FAA parlance, that word has another meaning) and only once did I feel the Seller mis-represented the true state of the aircraft. The acft had sustained serious damage – that was known by all , BUT it was the appalling repair that was not communicated, that and heaps of corrosion bubbling under a recent re-spray.
The worst scenario typically is a Broker that is NOT a maintenance shop or A&P and/or has little or ne real experience with the actual acft. These are the ones that take out adverts that say almost NOTHING about the actual acft and just copy volumes of generic “type” information that is of zero value.
Michael wrote:
With the proliferation of good quality digital cameras and e-mail , this really shouldn’t happen any more.
Maybe not, but this was 15 years ago.
Michael wrote:
In the example of the 140 I bought, sight-un-seen, tens of thousands miles away, I DID have the seller take pictures of EVERYTHING as well as scans of all the logs and paperwork
We had photocopies of some logs but found part of the originals had “gone missing” between that time and our arrival in Johannesburg. The faults we found were inside a PT6; even now I think a human needs to actually look at things like that. A tiny crack means a big cost.
Neil wrote:
The faults we found were inside a PT6; even now I think a human needs to actually look at things like that. A tiny crack means a big cost.
Makes perfect sense when were talking about twin TPs that are well into the 6 figures and engines that are as well !
With the proliferation of good quality digital cameras and e-mail , this really shouldn’t happen any more.
I too would shoot my logbooks into a PDF, but the constant thread I see and hear from pilots I know is that a large % of sellers simply won’t co-operate on this. It could be they are stupid / illiterate / lazy / unable to use a camera… but I don’t believe that. It could be they get time wasters but an intelligent person can judge a time waster with a high probability just from the writing style, never mind the content!
So, they refuse to do it for some other reason, and I think it is exactly the same reason that most sellers of products won’t put prices on a website. It is done to encourage a “contact” – in this case a visit to view it.
The objective is IMHO to put the buyer under pressure to not walk away empty-handed, and usually it works.
Then you get the “£10k to view” etc scams, done both by a real seller and a scammer. I’ve seen a few of those, too. As I have written before, one “famous” TB20, G-HOOD, was “on the market” like that for a long time. A number of buyers contacted me about it. It was made more complicated by the real owner not confirming/denying it, for some reason… It never became clear whether it really was for sale. (It was sold later AFAIK).
When I purchased both used aircraft the logbooks were scanned to me in full before I even discussed price or considered looking at the aircraft.
Golden Rule.
If you see something for sale at a bargain price, particularly on electronic/digital media, then it is likely to be a fake or scam. It’s usually too good to be true. This applies to anything you buy and especially to aircraft.
I keep POH (not logbooks) on pdf. If you don’t want to copy documents yourself then you can easily find a company to do it for you at reasonable cost, including indexing. Putting logbooks into a pdf prior to purchase, is essential for me to view an aircraft. This becomes even more important if foreign travel is required to view the aircraft.
I never saw the G-HOOD adverts, but would be interested to see any examples.Peter wrote:
“famous” TB20, G-HOOD, was “on the market” like that for a long time
That stuff was several years ago. I am sure any ads will be long gone.
I think the basic problem is that anybody can stick an ad for anybody else’s plane on any for-sale website. Nobody there checks anything, and if they do, they will check the contact details supplied, where somebody will helpfully reply 
This makes fraud easy. Just pick a plane, advertise it, and ask for viewing deposits.
Edit: It was around Sept 2010. 10% deposit to view it.
Peter wrote:
I think the basic problem is that anybody can stick an ad for anybody else’s plane on any for-sale website. Nobody there checks anything, and if they do, they will check the contact details supplied, where somebody will helpfully replyThis makes fraud easy. Just pick a plane, advertise it, and ask for viewing deposits.
Does not apply only to airplanes. Same thing happens in Paris for rental houses. Someone picks out an apartment where the owners have obviously left on vacation and post an ad. In the meantime they have broken into it, made it theirs. The prospective renters show up at the appointment, the fraudster examines his/her paperwork, says everything is in order and requires first month’s rent and one month’s deposit.
I rent two studios and not a single tenant (parents) has ever asked me for any proof of ownership. They just cut me a cheque 
