Decide: new or used
For a lot of the fleet this is already decided for you — there is nothing in production that matches the mission. Where you do have a choice, the gap between the two is depreciation, and it is larger than every other line in the budget put together.
- Time
- An evening with a calculator
- Cost
- Free
This step sits after category on purpose. Boat buyers get to make this decision first, because every kind of boat has something in current production. Airplanes are not like that. Large parts of the general aviation fleet have no current production at all, or one manufacturer at a seven-figure price, and if your mission statement landed you in one of those categories the decision has already been made for you. The honest thing to do is say so, rather than run you through a comparison with only one side to it.
Where both sides genuinely exist, the comparison is not close — but it does not run the direction most people assume, and it does not run the same direction for every buyer.
The one cost nobody budgets for
Depreciation is the largest single cost of owning a new airplane, and it is the only major cost that never arrives as a bill. Nothing shows up in the mail. You find out years later, when you sell.
What actually differs
Most of the buying process is identical either way — financing, insurance, ownership structure, hangar, operating cost, training and mission fit do not care how old the airplane is. Only two things really fork: the condition work, and how you acquire it.
| New | Used | |
|---|---|---|
| Biggest cost | Depreciation, invisible until you sell | Maintenance, and the repair you did not see coming |
| What you do not know | How this airframe behaves in its first few hundred hours | What the last owner did, and did not, do |
| Timeline | Months to a delivery slot, committed up front | Weeks — and you can walk away at any point |
| The inspection | Acceptance inspection at delivery | Pre-buy inspection before money moves |
| Warranty | Factory, limited by months and hours, sometimes transferable | None, unless you buy a service plan |
| Financing | Longer terms and better rates | Shorter terms, and real scrutiny on older airframes |
| Support | Factory training, current parts, a dealer who wants you happy | A type club, a specialist shop, and the internet |
The honest case for buying new
It is not vanity, and the depreciation number does not settle the argument on its own. A new airplane dispatches. You know the maintenance state because you created it, the avionics will still be supported in twenty years, the safety equipment is a generation ahead, and the warranty means an unexpected repair is a phone call rather than a five-figure surprise. If you fly for business, or fly a lot, or simply do not have weekends to spend chasing an intermittent fault, that reliability is worth paying for.
There is also a version of this decision where the money is not the point, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. Plenty of people can afford the depreciation and would rather have the new airplane. That is a legitimate choice. What is not legitimate is making it without knowing the number.
The honest case for buying used
Someone else has already paid the steepest part of the depreciation curve. The selection is enormously wider, you can usually buy a better-equipped airplane than you could afford new, and the type has a documented body of known problems — which is worth more than it sounds, because it means the surprises have already happened to somebody else and been written up.
The cost is uncertainty and your own time. You will spend weekends reading logbooks, you will pay for at least one pre-buy on an airplane you do not end up buying, and your first year of ownership will contain a repair you did not budget for. Everyone says they have budgeted for it. Almost nobody has.
Stacked ten-year cost comparison — a new airplane against two used ones — with depreciation as the dominant band on the new column and maintenance plus engine reserve dominating the used ones. This is the single most persuasive graphic on the site and it should be interactive, with controls for years owned, hours flown and resale market.
A test that usually settles it
Work out the depreciation over the number of years you honestly expect to keep the airplane, divide it by the hours you honestly expect to fly, and put it next to the hourly cost of everything else. If depreciation is the biggest number on the page by a wide margin and the reliability argument does not apply to how you actually fly, buy used. If you fly enough hours that it spreads thin, or dispatch reliability is genuinely load-bearing for you, new starts making sense quickly.
- Check whether your category even has current production before comparing
- Price the depreciation explicitly — it is the largest cost of a new airplane and the only invisible one
- Spread it over the hours you will honestly fly, not the hours in the brochure
- Buy new for dispatch reliability and support; buy used for everything else
- Either way, the rest of this guide is the same — only the condition work and the acquisition mechanics change