What is my airplane actually worth?
Asking prices are not sale prices, the guides lag the market, and the single biggest variable is not on any spec sheet. How to arrive at a number you can defend.
There are three numbers people mean by value, and confusing them is how negotiations get stuck. There is what the published guides say, which is a starting point built from historical transactions. There is what comparable aircraft are <em>listed</em> at, which is what sellers hope for. And there is what comparable aircraft have <em>sold</em> for, which is the only one that is real and the hardest to get.
Asking prices run consistently above sale prices, and in a slow market the gap widens because the aircraft that are still listed are disproportionately the overpriced ones. A page of listings is a survey of what has not sold.
What moves the number most
In rough order of impact on a typical piston single:
- Engine time remaining against TBO — the single largest variable on most airframes, and worth tens of thousands at the extremes
- Damage history — a repaired incident, properly documented, still costs value permanently
- Avionics — a modern IFR-capable panel is worth real money; an obsolete one is a deduction, not a neutral
- Logbook completeness — gaps and missing records reduce value more than owners expect, because a buyer cannot verify what is not written down
- Airframe total time — matters, but far less than engine time and condition
- Corrosion history and where it has lived — a coastal life shows up in the price
- Paint and interior — the most visible and the least valuable; they move the speed of sale more than the price
- Useful load — two examples of the same model can differ by hundreds of pounds, and the heavier one is worth less
Engine time deserves special treatment because owners routinely get it wrong in both directions. A run-out engine does not simply deduct the cost of an overhaul — it deducts that plus a discount for the buyer’s risk and downtime. And a freshly overhauled engine does not add its full cost, because the buyer did not get to choose the shop.
A value-versus-engine-hours curve showing how value declines as an engine approaches TBO and steps back up after overhaul, with the step-up visibly smaller than the overhaul cost. This single picture explains most valuation arguments.
How to actually arrive at a number
Work from the outside in.
- Start with a published valuation guide for the model and year, as a baseline rather than an answer
- Adjust for engine and propeller time against TBO, honestly
- Adjust for avionics against what the market currently expects in that class
- Deduct for damage history, logbook gaps, and any corrosion findings
- Cross-check against what genuinely comparable aircraft are listed at — then discount, because listings are asks
- If real money depends on the answer, pay for a professional appraisal
If you are selling
The two things that most reliably increase what you get are unglamorous: complete, well-organised logbooks, and a recent annual with the squawks actually fixed. Both remove buyer uncertainty, and buyer uncertainty is always priced in.
The two things that most reliably reduce what you get are an optimistic asking price that leaves the aircraft sitting for eight months, and photographs that hide rather than show. Serious buyers assume the worst about what is not pictured, and they are usually right.
And one piece of arithmetic worth doing before you list at all: every month the airplane sits unsold, you pay the hangar, the insurance and the accruing annual. Three months of holding out for another five thousand dollars can cost more than the five thousand.