King wrote:
Our Canadair CT-133 is "sorta" for sale (As they say everything is for sale at the right price) at $180. But that is a high price, but it also is a pretty nice airplane.
King,
I've seen the ad for your T-Bird and I'm not suggesting you couldn't get in the range your asking especially if it's a really clean airplane with autopilot and newer avionics and other upgrades. I know some of the recent T-33s sold out of Mountainview went for less than $50,000 USD. As you know, the sale price for those jets is just the beginning of the total aquisition cost to get it to a safe, FAA approved airworthiness state. The maintainers at Mountainview will have to be paid to run and prep them for ferry flight a few months away, and paid rent for hangaring. Once the airplane is flown to the US, a thorough condition inspection can easily run $25,000-$35,000 and up for just the labor to inspect it thoroughly. For example, installing three new Gill gel batteries will cost $3600, a set of brake rotors and pucks $3700--you can see how the price can climb. If problems are discovered, then more labor and parts costs so the final tab is really an unknown. I'm confident the airplanes are a pretty good risk that way, though they've been sitting outside for a while so that account for the lower prices than the $90,000 I paid for mine (tail #579) when it was fresh out of 434 Squadron at CFB Greenwood, run and checked regularly for the few months it sat at Mountainview before I flew it to my maintenance shop (Heritage Aero) in Rockford IL. Anyway, good news that more flyable T-33s are headed to the warbird world!