spoon059 wrote:
If it were me I would take it to a trusted shop (kinda hard from 500 miles away) and pay an hourly rate to have a trusted mechanic inspect it.
And more often than not, this is the problem. You see a coach on RVT or RVTrader, it looks nice, but it's a round trip plane ride and a night in a hotel to just look at it. If you could find a third party to just go look at it and say if it's worth pursuing, there's some value in that. I know there are a few RV.net members that live close to PPL and have volunteered to do just that. No one asked for a guarantee from them.
We have a similar problem buying airplanes. You really need to do a pre-buy inspection to make sure, among other things, that the plane is airworthy. So you arrange with a local (to the plane) A&P mechanic to look at it, or pay for your A&P to travel to where the plane is. The consequences of not doing this are huge financially. No one asks for a guarantee. It's assumed that the certification of aircraft mechanics is guarantee enough.
