Well, I returned to England as planned with a view to completing the purchase of the X-Air. I’ll not go into the full detail but once more it appears that I managed to get involved with yet another awkward person who has managed to disrupt my plans yet again. I’d put up the whole of the agreed price of the aircraft so I could fly and evaluate it on the French 3rd-Party Only insurance that I’d taken out before leaving for the UK and ensure that it was as the seller had described it in his advertisement. Full risk cover is only available in France on aircraft valued at 10000€ or more, which excluded the X-Air, so putting up the money would have indemnified the seller of all risk while I was flying his aircraft. But the advantage would also have been that if the aircraft had checked out OK and was ‘as advertised’, I could then have quickly concluded the sale and made plans to depart for France at the earliest opportunity. On the other hand, if it had not, I would have had the strength of the law behind me to ensure that I got my money back.
Unfortunately, I never got a chance to fly it even, because when I started it up (I’d even filled it up because the seller had said that it was ‘Ready to fly away’) I’d got the biggest mag drop that I’ve ever seen at any time on any aircraft – about 600 RPM on one side. The other side checked out fine so I even then went to the lengths of removing, cleaning and re-gapping the plugs before trying again. But to no avail because the mag drop still remained, indicating that the engine was unserviceable and unsafe to take off with. After all, that’s why we always carry out mag checks, isn’t it.
The aircraft has had something of a history of this according to its log books, so having concluded that it was not ‘as advertised’, I did what I was legally entitled to do, rejected it and asked for the return of all the monies I had paid. I would have had no intention anyway of continuing with the purchase after that as a further consideration was that even if an attempt had been made to rectify the problem, there is no way that I would have been prepared to take off and do a water crossing immediately afterwards followed by a flight of almost the length of France over terrain much of which, especially further south, is quite hostile.
It’s then that things became nasty. If the seller had started and checked the engine before he put his aircraft up for sale, he would have discovered the mag drop for himself and it was because he had not done that it was left for me to do so. Nevertheless, he then took it upon himself to retain my deposit. As the problem that resulted in the cancellation of the sale was of his own making, he cannot do that of course, but I now have the tedious matter of mounting an action against him in the Small Claims Court if he does not comply with my request to return the money.
What the heck’s going on that I keep getting involved in all this aggravation? All that I want to do is retire quietly and enjoy flying microlights in France but it seems that I’m being thwarted at every turn, by events, circumstances or awkward people. I had no idea that I’d be on the receiving end of all this stuff and I have to confess that it’s all now beginning to get rather tedious 😐
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Hiya Russell isn’t it? Don’t know where I got that from, someone told me I think. Yup, that’s what I thought too but you never know how things will turn out do you. But as you can see from the next post, it has all worked out OK in the end and it was a shame as I did like the chap when we first met. It’s too big a responsibility I think to get someone else to view an aircraft for me. For the next one I’ll have to just get the seller to send me loads of pics from all angles and then just bite the bullet and come back to view it myself. I’ll just view this as a hiccup, just another bump in the road and keep on moving forward.
sorry to hear that Roger, had assumed that the aircraft was a good one (looked that way on the advert) and then to hit such an obvious problem as this must be very frustrating. owner has no leg to stand on you will get your cash back.