Pressurised light twin question

Mooney_Driver wrote:

There was a great Seneca I for sale in Italy a while ago, with Aspen and all for around 50k Euros. It was gone in several days. Currently there is one more in Italy, but I don’t know how good it is. There was one in Switzerland which got sold to Croatia I believe but was crash landed shortly after.

I called for that one 1 day late, deposit was already done and my friends weren’t hot enough to get this one that far.
It was lying in the center of Croatia, 4 hours of c172 from our base, to arrange a trip in a very short terms was too fsat for them.

Ultranomad wrote:

We were seriously thinking of buying that one until the owner confessed that most of the airframe was stored outdoors :-(

There you go! I share your sentiments! And after now having owned a few fixer-uppers, I think the romance of them has worn off.

Peter – not actually sure it was Kent now, might have been East Sussex somewhere. Can’t quite remember.

Ultranomad wrote:

A beautiful aircraft indeed, but quite labour-intensive to work on. Some tasks are best performed by a trained octopus or a gynaecologist.

I think the pilot might need even more arms than an octopus in order to operate that assortment of levers.

The recent mention of octopus brings up memories…

“And we will talk to the boats captain who crossed a chicken with an octopus so the crew could have a leg each!” (The Two Ronnies)

(and while that is biologically impossible, picture the following: A few years back we got guests for xmas and were preparing a roast goose in the oven. That one gets stitched shut after stuffing. Because we were a lot of people, we had bought two additional legs and in a rush of excitement decided to try to stitch those onto the poor bird in order to roast the whole beast together. Lo and behold this actually worked, you could not really tell the difference in taste or consistency, however the bird did cause quite some double takes when it was presented to the guests. 4 legs and two wings… The folks were quite pleased with the result however.)

gallois wrote:

If you want to go jet fuelled you need to fly a much bigger aircraft. The Baron was as big as I wanted to go. I tried a King Air C90 but I felt like I was working.rather than enjoying.a hobby.

Can you elaborate on the hassles of having a King air vs a Baron in Europe?

JohnR wrote:

It is not the enroute charges that hurt when flying a light twin IFR in Europe, although they are irritating, they are small compared to Avgas costs. The real killer is the handling, landing and parking charges when you are over 2t. I have flown a 2.4t twin across Europe for 20 years and those additional costs keep going up.

Could you elaborate please? What would the extra yearly costs / hassles be for an aircraft that is 1999kg vs 2500kg?

There is often a big step at 1500kg, which often doubles the landing fee for SR22s compared to TB20s. Then, yes, another at 2000kg.

The IFR route charges at 2000kg+ are less than the avgas but still annoying enough to make people fly “VFR” in whatever wx. It doesn’t always end well… N2195B was one local to me. Another “very famous” UK Aztec pilot, formerly on EuroGA, was very public about his “VFR” exploits. I believe the main reason the EU/Eurocontrol don’t lower that 2000kg limit is because loads more people would be flying illegal VFR.

Eurocontrol charges apply to both if you fly IFR but IIRC they are based on tonnage and on route so each flight is different cost wise.

AFAIK Eurocontrol charges are based on MTOW.

With the Twinkie having such a fan base of support and smaller engines it is quite a bit cheaper to operate than the Seneca for the time being anyway. The counter rotating props PA39? version and the addition of vortex generators makes it a pretty decent go anywhere light twin.

Discussion of general twin performance moved to the Twin Performance thread