Sleep Tight, Old 40RC
By Richard L. Collins
January 2008
 I retired my airplane, my 40RC. For the first time since November 21, 1952, I don’t have an airplane waiting patiently in my hangar for me to come flying. It was not a decision made lightly nor was it prompted by some event. Rather, it was something that I had been thinking about for a couple of years and, finally, one day I pulled the trigger.
Certainly I got my money’s worth out of that Cessna P210, flying it 8,963.44 hours in 28 years, five months and 13 days. Someone asked me how many turns of the prop that would be. I think about 1.317 billion, though my calculator doesn’t go that high.
If anything, there was a mindset that I had about worn the airplane out. Sure, the engine and prop had been overhauled, many times. But there were also a lot of other elements about the airplane that didn’t owe me any more use. I have always been a stickler about keeping an airplane in perfect shape, no squawks allowed, and as the airplane aged and built time this became more difficult. In a way, given the mechanical services available, I felt like I was losing the battle.
Also, I had always remembered a conversation I had with a Cessna engineer when I took delivery of the airplane in April 1979. I was curious about how much testing had been done on the pressure vessel and I asked him. His reply was that the amount of testing done was probably equal to about 10,000 hours, though there would be no life limit placed on it because none was required under the regulations of that day. The only life limit was on the windshield, windows and cover for the deice light: 13,000 hours.
My use of the airplane had dropped and it would have flown far less than 100 hours in 2007 had I kept it to the end of the year. Never before had I flown one of my airplanes that little in a year. There was nothing on the horizon that suggested increased use. If anything, it might decrease further because of a lessening of my involvement with Flying.
Because of my age, 73 at the time, the insurance was becoming a bigger and bigger deal. I was unable to renew my high liability limits under what I deemed reasonable terms so I was flying with less protection. The high cost of maintenance and other things put the hourly operating cost way high, and in total it just wasn’t making any sense. For my low level of use, renting airplanes would be a better solution, and renting, I get to fly with the G1000 glass cockpit and new Garmin autopilot. By comparison, my old P210 panel looked like a hodge-podge from a World War I warship.
I communicated with a couple of dealers who are allegedly knowledgeable in that market and neither of them would put a value on the airplane. One said the amount of total time made it impossible for him to say what it might be worth.
I advertised the airplane and got only one serious query. I told him about the Cessna engineer’s statement about 10,000 hours worth of testing and he was still interested.
This prospect said he had owned a P210 so I might have felt okay selling it to him, with full disclosure about the maintenance things that were on the horizon. Some of these would be expensive, like deice boots at $13,000. I don’t think I would have felt good about selling it to anyone other than an ex-P210 owner because it is a complicated and temperamental airplane that has not done well in the hands of users.
A while back I calculated that the P210 has the worst fatal accident rate of any certified piston single, with engine failures the number one villain in these serious accidents. It is an unusual airplane in that regard. Engine failures are not a big deal in serious accidents in other airplanes. I had thus always maintained a healthy suspicion of everything forward of the firewall and spent copious amounts of money trying to keep it calm up there.
I might not have needed to worry about selling the airplane to a relatively inexperienced end user because of insurance. Avemco, which knows the numbers on the airplane as well as I do, won’t insure P210s even when flown by a pilot with 9,000 hours in type.
My one prospect backed out, citing health reasons. I’m sure that was the reason, too, but if he had said he decided he just didn’t want the airplane, I would have understood and returned the money he sent for a right of first refusal.
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