Addie's place on the web...

Just some stuff I want to share with you

Emotions, paperwork and unexpected detours

Tuesday 8 July 2025
FlyingOwning a plane

The last few weeks have been intense. While trying to agree on a pickup date for the plane in France, we found ourselves buried in paperwork - and slowly realizing that our French counterparts have a different understanding of the word “agreement” than we have.

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Let's make a deal!

Monday 19 May 2025
FlyingOwning a plane

Buying a plane isn’t just about finding the right aircraft. Once you’ve found “the one”, the real work begins: negotiations, paperwork, and a fair bit of uncertainty. Now that we have found a Robin that we like, it was time to try and actually buy it.

We have started negotiations with L’Union Aérienne Lille Roubaix Tourcoing (UALRT) to convince them to sell the F-GSBM to us. Next to price, we also had to come to an agreement on work to be done before handover. This was the first time we were negotiating with a French flying club - something completely new to all of us.

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Two more candidates

Thursday 1 May 2025
FlyingOwning a plane

Robin DR400s with a 180 hp engine don’t come up for sale often. So, when two showed up on PlaneCheck at the same time, we dropped everything, cleared our calendars, and set off on our next road trip.

We were lucky that we could plan to visit both planes on two consecutive days. Both are in France, but there’s 300 km between them. Let’s go!

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Road trip!

Thursday 20 March 2025
FlyingOwning a plane

We made up our minds and decided to start searching for “our” Robin DR400. Time to power on the computer and browse to PlaneCheck to find out what’s available out there. There were a few Robins that got our attention and we contacted the sellers for additional information; some didn’t bother to respond; others came with a short “it’s already sold” response. It’s clear that we need to act fast when a new plane is put up for sale!

Then Bas warned us: even when everything looks great on paper and on the website, once you stand next to the plane, you may find that you either love or hate it. We need to get on the road and start to visit some of these beauties.

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Go for it?

Sunday 16 February 2025
FlyingOwning a plane

The financial analysis we did back in October made clear what we already suspected: owning a plane isn’t cheap. But having the numbers on your screen in a spreadsheet was confronting and made us wonder if we were willing to put that much money into our hobby.

Some time has passed and we have had some time to think things over. The dark and cold months are behind us, and the good weather is getting closer. At some point we have to stop thinking about it and decide which plane we are going to fly this year. So, let’s have dinner, discuss and see if we can come to a conclusion.

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