Cessna Turbo Skylane
(continued) The Turbo develops cruise power all the way up to its ceiling of 20,000 feet, and we were cruise climbing with the knobs full forward, showing 120 knots and around 700 fpm all the way up to 8,000 feet. At slower speeds, the airplane will climb at better than 1,000 fpm initially at max weight. With full fuel and the two of us, we still had enough capacity for another passenger and enough 100LL in the tanks for a round trip to MRF without fueling up there. We could have also fueled to the tabs -- 64 gallons -- and taken four and bags and still had better than four hours of endurance. That’s utility.
At 8,000 feet we were seeing true airspeeds of slightly better than 150 knots, and at that altitude our headwinds were manageable, around 20 knots or so. In my book, 130 knots over the ground with a 20-knot headwind is workable for even long cross-country flying, and longtime Skylane owners seem to agree.
The fuel burn was higher than you’d get with a normally aspirated 540, but only by a gallon or two per hour. We were looking at right around 17.5 gph at our high power cruise of 28 inches and 2400 rpm, which gave us around 85 percent power. Pulling back the throttle a little, to 25 inches, will cut fuel by a gallon or so per hour while still yielding around 145 knots true at that altitude. Because the airplane was brand new, we kept the power at the higher setting, as per Cessna’s break-in procedures.
Terrain, Terrain
As we got within a hundred miles of Marfa, the desert terrain had already begun to rise beneath us, and to the south we could see near-10,000-foot peaks in the distance in Mexico. Marfa itself lies at an elevation of nearly 5,000 feet msl, and there were a few substantially higher ridgelines running north and south as we approached the area. (Story continues on next page)
Used Skylanes. Challenges and Opportunities.
There’s something that most owners looking to sell their high-performance singles haven’t quite figured out yet: It’s a buyer’s market.
They’d better get used to it, though. The market for used Skylanes is very good for buyers right now and very challenging for sellers, and that has been the case for some time. It is, in fact, a situation that predated by years the economic downturn, though the current financial crisis has exacerbated the situation, to be sure.
In terms of the Skylane, the drop in value for the airplane has been dramatic, both in the short- and in the long-term. This is not, I should point out, unique to the 182: All high-performance singles, both late and not-so-late model examples, have suffered similar large drops in value, with the newest models getting hit the hardest.
The online aircraft value reference, Vref Online, shows that decline graphically. Just in the first quarter of the year the value of a couple years’ old Turbo Skylane plummeted by nearly 10 percent overall -- that’s in just three months’ time! -- and its value dropped by nearly a quarter over the previous year.
Slighter older Skylanes fared slightly better but still saw their value drop by around 15 percent over that same one-year time frame. Both turbocharged and naturally aspirated models experienced similar drops in retail and wholesale prices.
For even older Skylanes, those produced before Cessna restarted production in the ’90s, the trend is the same -- down, down, down -- though the percentages and the actual dollar value decreases are, of course, smaller. A good condition 1982 Skylane, which might have been selling for as much as $150,000 a few years ago, is selling for around $90,000 today. And airplanes in this class are taking much longer to sell than before, too.
This creates a challenge for Cessna in selling its new airplanes, as it competes against a used market replete with nicely equipped late model used Skylanes going for great prices. According to Vref, a 2006 Turbo Skylane in average condition (that is, nice, and with 400 hours or fewer on it) and typically equipped sells for an average of around $240,000, or around $115,000 less than when it was bought just a few years earlier and just a little more than half the price of a new Turbo Skylane, which currently goes for around $420,000.
Two of the important things Cessna has going for it with its new airplanes are new equipment (including the excellent Garmin GFC 700 autopilot and Synthetic Vision), which you can’t get on older airplanes, and the new-airplane warranty, which substantially reduces the cost of ownership those first couple of years. --Robert Goyer
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