We pilots are, for the most part, pretty analytical creatures. We love our data, we love our spreadsheets, and we love our charts. Most of all, we love to harness all of these things when shopping for our first airplane, carefully poring over and comparing all the specifications and performance data we can find.
My friends Marty and Emily are as technically minded as anyone. Both professional pilots, he is an aerial firefighter and she flies for a major airline. They track their budgets like professional accountants and carefully analyze any sizable household expenditures. But when the time came to start shopping for their first airplane, they did something many do not: they left a big part of the decision-making process open to chance, reasoning that they might not be able to predict exactly what make or model airplane might find them as they searched.
