Used Jets: Real Airplanes or Spare-Part Repositories?

Stephen Pope

Monday, June 17, 2013 at 11:44 PM ET

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Key Takeaways:

Older private jets, though appearing cheap to purchase, come with deceptively high operating costs including expensive engine overhauls, major inspections, significant fuel consumption, and difficulty in securing maintenance plans, insurance, or financing.
Many low-cost older jets are acquired not for flying, but for their spare parts, or for extensive, costly, and time-consuming refurbishments that gut and modernize the aircraft, a viable option primarily for models with high inherent value.
The aging business jet fleet is driving a market recovery for newer planes and the emergence of "remanufactured" jets—modernized older airframes—as maintaining very old models becomes increasingly impractical and uneconomical due to regulatory updates and repair complexities.

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Photo by Terry Shepherd|

Perusing the for-sale sections of used-jet websites turns up some intriguing listings for older Citations, Learjets, Falcons and Gulfstreams, many of which are selling for less than the price of a typical high-performance piston single. When you can pick up a Cessna Citation I/SP for around the same price as a used Cirrus SR22, something’s seriously amiss.