New AOPA Aircraft Valuation Benefit - Windsock

[Lax291]

For those AOPA members who didn't see in the last newsletter, you get 12 free valuations through Windsock as a benefit. 

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2026/january/14/aopa-offers-member-exclusive-aircraft-valuation

Was a pretty easy process to login and enter my aircraft info, and valuation looked to be within 10% of Jimmy's Mooney guide. 

[toto]

Interesting. That removes a little of the sting from losing vRef. 

[Rick Junkin]

I ran my Bravo on it and it came up with a valuation that matched what my own market study came up with. I just did the "gross valuation" without ordering the full report so I didn't get the details of the valuation. I'm satisfied it will produce a good valuation when I need it. Vref was a little more detailed on the inputs, for instance it wanted to know how old the avionics were, but Windsock gave me a good result.

[hazek]

Does this work regardless of the AOPA chapter one is a member of?

[midlifeflyer]

1 hour ago, hazek said:

Does this work regardless of the AOPA chapter one is a member of?

Chapter? Are you talking about the non-US member organizations that make up IAOPA? If so, I think that’s a federation of independent organizations and benefits would depend on the local group.

[hazek]

Yes, I didn’t know what to call say AOPA Luxembourg of which I’m a member of.

[midlifeflyer]

4 hours ago, hazek said:

Yes, I didn’t know what to call say AOPA Luxembourg of which I’m a member of.

I don't know but there's an easy way to find out.  Go to https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/aircraft-and-ownership/buying-an-aircraft/aircraft-valuation and see if you can log in with your membership username and password. 

It's AI-based and I have no idea if the data it's accessing is domestic or international.

[TangoTango]

I just ran a full report valuation on my airplane, and I am unimpressed. The full report is emailed to you quickly, and the first page is the "Report Summary" which includes lots of incorrect performance specs (it wasn't smart enough to catch the 2900# gross weight on later J models, it quotes takeoff and landing distances that can't be attained at 2740# or 2900# on an isa day, and it states the M20J range is only 700nm) and an "executive brief" with lots of adjectives. It also includes a "Base Value", but there is no description of how they arrived at that number (are avionics and hours included in this? It doesn't appear so)

The second page is the "Windsock Value Deep-Dive" with a note that it uses a separate model and "does not indicate exact results but should be used as a rough sense for explaining why the model breaks down the way it does". This has lots of inputs with numbers attached, but very little description of how they work. For instance, it added $4,189.47 for "Aircraft Capabilities" and $5,751.79 for "Aircraft History" (these are separate from avionics and airframe time), and it included a $0.66 adder for an engine 150 hours from TBO (I guess the model assumes TBO as the baseline and adds $0.66 for the last 150 hours?). There is no total line on page 2, but if you add the adders up mine came out over 10% higher than the estimate on page 1.

Some of the statistics on later pages are interesting, but the whole thing has a little too much AI for me to trust. I'll keep using Jimmy Garrison's guide.

[Pinecone]

Just ran my Mooney through it and came out right about what I expected.