Doing the sums

I’ve just transferred the cash over from my UK savings account to my French bank account to pay for the X-Air and including both the sterling to euro foreign exchange costs and the international transfer, the X-Air has cost me the princely sum of £4461. This is not a lot of money in my book for an aircraft with the hours it has on it and a 582 blue top engine, and that even though it needs a little bit of tidying up, is solid and immediately flyable. It doesn’t have any doors on it at the moment but Bertrand has said that they will come with it. The doors are an optional kit and as the climate is so much warmer in the Dordogne compared to the UK, I’m thinking that maybe I might actually leave them off. The elevator trim cable is quite rusty but Bertrand also said that various cables, pulleys etc will also be coming with it, so I’m hoping I’ll be getting a replacement in the price.

X-Airs in the UK were coming out in the region of £6000 and the costs involved in viewing them and if I bought one, getting it over to France, were very high, adding I would estimate somewhere between £500 and £1000 to that figure. So overall I think that things have turned out pretty well. One additional cost that I will have though, will be for some kind of outdoor covers. I can knock some up as I did for MYRO but that will take time and we’re now going into the winter, of course. We haven’t had much rain or wind ever since I came down here, but we’ve had both today as the remains of hurricane Nadine have sent some awful weather scurrying across into Europe. For us in south-west France, the worst has already passed but apparently all areas of the UK are set to be battered by high winds and torrential rain for another two or three days, so we can consider ourselves lucky really. It would be nice to get hold of some second-hand outdoor covers but I somehow doubt that that’ll be possible in the time available, so I have a bit of a dilemma as I could never leave the aircraft tied down outside without doors and with no covers on it at all. As I’ll be bringing it to my house initially, at least I’ll be able to just cover it temporarily with a tarpaulin but then I’ll have to decide what I’ll need to do for the future. And except for the X-Air that I went to see in the UK but didn’t buy, which would have come with a cheap set of outdoor covers, I’d have incurred the same cost anyway.