Life with a Luscombe: Boredom Leads to Buying

It had been a few months since I had settled in Biloxi. While I was having a blast instructing as well as flying gliders and the Pawnee over at Elsanor, there was little to occupy me at work. Unfortunately, the Air Force didn't have much for me to do while I waited to start my class and I started to get bored. My days were spent surfing the web and listening to music at “work.” I had never anticipated that such easy living would get so dull. I was more frequently finding myself on Barnstormers.com.

My flying with Dan had refined my tastes for airplanes to either a Cessna 140 or a Luscombe 8A. I was learning as much about these airplanes as I could and was constantly comparing the various ads on Barnstormers. I knew I wanted one of these airplanes for their relative economy compared to other bigger and more expensive airplanes. I wanted an airplane that was as basic as possible, wouldn’t run the bills up, and had fewer complex parts to break. The airplane also had to be either blue and white or blue and silver, my two favorite color combinations. While a 140 has more horsepower than a Luscombe, I liked the idea of not having to comply with the 2020 ADS-B mandate—from which the non-electric Luscombe was exempt. However, my highly specific searches for well-maintained 140s and Luscombes with low-time engines in blue paint did not turn up many matches. The ones that did match were either too expensive or too far away to go look at. I resigned to not buy an airplane until I got my first duty station after Keesler (October, 2018) and paid off the last little bit of my flight training loan. 

Cessna 140, © David Twibell 2018

One day, an unexpected opportunity presented itself to me: I met a gentleman who owned a Citabria that stayed in the main hangar at Ocean Springs, the airport I frequent the most. I found out that the airplane was for sale and was in my price range. All of a sudden, I wanted the Citabria! It was a cool little airplane and it was aerobatic capable—a type of flying I had wanted to get into for a long time. I tried to figure out a time to fly with him but our schedules never quite matched up. 

This got my gears turning. I was right back where I was when I wanted to buy the Cessna 140, only eight months prior. The price was right for the Citabria but the engine was timed out and I wasn't ready to foot the bill for an airplane I hadn’t flown and didn’t have much time left on the overhauled engine. However, this opportunity got me back into the mood for buying an airplane. After some hard thinking and research, I couldn’t come up with any excuses that outweighed my reasons to buy an airplane. The money situation was right if I were to get a loan and, location-wise, all of the base options I had on my assignments list were conducive to me owning an airplane. My projected purchase date of late 2018 started to creep closer and closer. Almost as if it was meant to be, I discovered one of the few airplanes that met my criteria: a 1946 non-electric blue Luscombe that was only 70 miles away over in Hammond, Louisiana! 

Luscombe, © David Twibell 2018

I called the owner on a Wednesday and arranged to go over that Sunday to take a look at the airplane. However, early in the afternoon, my last student of the day cancelled his lesson. Being booked solid for flying lessons two weeks in advance, I’m usually not pleased when a student cancels on short notice—especially on such a good weather day since another student could have taken the slot. But this time, I couldn't get the airplane out of my mind so I called the owner back and asked if I could come see it that evening instead. He said yes, so I headed for Louisiana immediately after leaving work. I was excited and nervous all at once! I started thinking about all of the logistics I would have to arrange to make this all work out: a loan, hangar, insurance, supplies, and a prebuy. The pit of my stomach got heavier and heavier as my truck rolled west to the Bayou State.

To be continued...