Parker_Woodruff

Many commercial aviation insurance clients (flight schools, maintenance shops) have been seeing rate decreases. We'll see what happens with personal aircraft.

Things get expensive past mid-December

While price is one of the most important data points, what this tool doesn't do is evaluate coverage quality. While most auto insurers have fairly common policy coverages, aviation coverages can be substantially different from insurer to insurer. Some important items: Is Non-owned hull & liability covered? To what limit? $100K? The value of the insured aircraft? A percentage of the aircraft's value? How many seats maximum? What about emergency landing expenses where there's no damage to the aircraft? $10K? $25K? Up to the value of the airplane? Hail damage limits for cosmetic hail damage? 10% of the agreed value minus a deductible? Or is all hail damage covered? What about getting that written off the policy if you primarily hangar your plane? Crew bodily injury exclusions? Someone gets a low price on insuring their Mooney Acclaim, but did their agent tell them that their insurer excludes crew bodily injury? So if they're receiving training and the CFI is injured in an accident, they policyholder will be defending themselves if the CFI brings a demand/suit. Does the tool just use the baseline of $1MM Each Occurrence for Bodily Injury and Property Damage limited to $100K each passenger bodily injury? We really like to see $200K each passenger (this usually only costs $70-$300 more per year).

We've got a strategy that has worked for many pilots. Since no one can perfectly predict the future, we also design our strategy around a couple "bail out" options that should be available around age 74/75. But we need a policy in force with an effective date at the pilots' age of 69 or earlier. Sometimes we can make 70-72 work on the 4 cylinder Mooneys.

Here are some other salvage sites you all might find of value. "Login as guest" is available on the sites that have a login page. Old Republic Aerospace: https://aircraftsalvageonline.com/Account/Login?ReturnUrl=%2f USAIG: https://www.usau.com/claims/salvage/ Starr Aviation: https://starraviationsalvage.com/login USSIC, Avemco, HCC: https://www.tmhcc.com/en-us/contact-us/underwriting-teams/aviation-group/avemco/aircraft-salvage#!/list

Like BWI, we can do the Beacon 6 month policy for the first term. In special circumstances Beacon can offer the 6 month policy on subsequent renewals (planning to sell plane, etc.)

The M20K seems to be the sweet spot for insurance for instrument rated pilots flying short & mid-body Mooneys.

You'd spend more renting a complex plane to gain RG hours than you would just paying the higher premium for the first year. We can get you covered in a Mooney as a brand new private pilot with one or two quality insurance companies.

It's a mixed bag. I believe most do not exclude it. Most companies that exclude it won't have any heartache providing a policy endorsement to allow special flight permits it as long as it's not a new policy where coverage was started with the plane being out of annual for an extended period of time. One company that requires notification always asks me "when was the most recent annual/when did the plane last fly" kind of questions. What they don't want is some chronically uninsured & not flying aircraft where they get to take the risk on that first takeoff...

Procedurally speaking, it could be done if the owner got a policy for it or if the buyer leased it first for more 30+ days. I've had people ask to do this before and I'm not signing an insurance company up for a day's worth of premium (that could be around $5 on a plane like this, including about 75 cents of commission to the broker after spending about $2-9 on DocuSigns and $3-$ to absorb an ACH fee) to take a risk of on flight. So I'd negotiate a minimum earned premium to do this. If the plane needs a special flight permit to get this done, the insurance piece might not get done at all. Older airplanes are being tough enough on the loss ratios without adding one to the mix that hasn't been flying for a tiny amount of premium.

You could try EAA's partner in Canada.

Not much, if any - depends on the insurance company

I see you fly an M20F. The vintage Mooneys have certainly taken noticeable increases over the past few years, though in the very recent past I've written a few modest premium reductions for F models and earlier. The M20J has increased, too, but not as much. The M20K seems immune from rate increases and models later to that have been flat or barely higher.

@MikeOH there's definitely the economics at play that you're postulating. For awhile, it seemed that shops, in general, were throwing out very high repair estimates. If they got the deal, great for them. If not, they had plenty of work anyway. Some of the 6-figure gear ups really got my attention. I don't think the repair market is as hot now, but it's still strong.

Let's say $18,000 teardown, $5000 propeller, $3000 logistics costs/extra labor if it happened away from the home airport or where repairs would be made, $1000 general claim expenses.

The engine teardowns are a pretty penny these days. I'm certain much of it is supply/demand, but parts costs are definitely up, too. I'd heard teardowns in the $18s and I believe a week or two ago I heard over $20K - can't remember if it was a 4 or 6 cyl.

One of our underwriting companies sent this claim inflation article out today. Note the inflation for a light aircraft prop strike and that the typical claim cost of prop strike on a Lycoming O-320 fitted to a training aircraft is $27,000. This is probably a $30,000-$35,000 event on a 4-cylinder Mooney. https://www.global-aero.com/navigating-claims-inflation-in-aviation-insurance-factors-driving-the-increase-in-repair-costs/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=september

I see this playing out one of a few ways: - ForeFlight partners with an agency and ends up marketing insurance through its app, earning a royalty. - ForeFlight launches an Avemco-style direct program or gets a program set up with an insurer that's marketed through an agency (either owned by Boeing or a third party and they make a royalty). - ForeFlight sells advertising space agency(ies) - It becomes merely a service within the app. I don't think they're asking for enough data for a comparison product to be usable to a typical Foreflight user right now unless they can get logbook data with tail numbers. If it's purely for the end user to compare and see if they're getting a good deal, this is just going to be a lot of explaining, fruitless shopping when they don't actually find a better deal, etc.

There was no cleaner Florida plane than Gary's. @joepilot you wouldn't know the hand-wringing it was for him to sell it. I remember Don Maxwell telling me how the Florida planes could have their issues, but not Gary's.

What would it cost for you to replace it with one of like kind and quality, including sales tax?

Ditch the 3-blade prop for a 2-blade Hartzell Top Prop. You'll probably also lose some vibration. Clean the plane - clean leading edges are worth a couple knots (seriously). Check rigging of all control surfaces using the Mooney rigging tools. Check gear as @KSMooniac said

If you were to stop the tug, make sure the plane won't keep rolling over the lip. Agree with the above comment about the castering wheels needing to be bigger to handle a lot of the hangar rails, pavement cracks, etc.

It's not expensive. It also covers the usually excluded riots, strikes, and civil commotions. Even after the major claims involved with Russia seizing airliners, it's not expensive, IMO. Russia's seizures will take up probably 40-100 years of aviation war premium at past rates.

Maybe I need to recommend my clients carry hull war risk (covers government confiscation) even if they're only flying inside the US.

The good thing about this insurance market is some of the old twins it weeded out. But...that market is leaving. About to be a race to the bottom in underwriting first, then pricing.