How to sell an aircraft

There is a real difference between selling, trading up, and testing the market — and the difference changes every decision that follows. A straight sale optimises for price and can wait. A trade-up optimises for timing, because two transactions have to close near enough together that you are neither aircraftless nor paying for two. Testing the market at an unrealistic number has a cost most owners underestimate: the aircraft becomes a fixture that buyers have watched sit, and the eventual sale is harder than if you had never listed it.

Walk into the process with your own view of value. Start from the class-typical picture — age, total airframe time relative to what is normal for that age, condition — then adjust for the things that genuinely move a number on your specific aircraft: engine programme enrolment, time since overhaul or remaining life, avionics generation, damage history, and how complete the logbooks are. You will get a range, not a figure, because a valuation is genuinely a range. Having that range in your head before the first broker call changes the conversation entirely.

Records are the single largest controllable variable in an aircraft sale. Airframe, engine and propeller logbooks; airworthiness directive compliance with a clean status list; service bulletin status; the maintenance tracking export; weight and balance; equipment list; STCs and 337s; damage and repair history with the paperwork behind it; the registration and title chain. Get all of it into one organised, scanned, indexed package before a buyer asks. A gap you find in month one is a discovery. The same gap found by a buyer's inspector in month five is a negotiation.

Deferred maintenance, a tired interior and dated paint all get discounted by buyers at rates well above what the work would have cost you. Clear the squawk list, or price it in openly. Detail it properly, inside and out, and have it photographed on a clear day by someone who has photographed aircraft before — not on a phone on a wet ramp. Presentation is not about disguising condition; it signals that the aircraft has been cared for, and that signal is what makes a buyer trust the rest of your file.

There are four realistic channels and they suit different situations. A sell-side broker on a success fee runs the process for you and is usually worth it on complex or high-value aircraft. Consignment with a dealer trades price for speed and certainty. A private, matched introduction to buyers who are already looking suits sellers who want discretion. Selling entirely on your own is genuinely viable for simple, well-documented piston and light turboprop aircraft, and rarely so above that. Whichever you choose, understand what you are signing before you sign it — particularly the length and exclusivity of any agreement.

Broad exposure and targeted exposure solve different problems. A public advertisement reaches everyone, including people who will never buy, and it publicly announces that you are exiting — which some sellers are entirely comfortable with and others are not. A matched introduction reaches fewer people but reaches ones who are already shopping your class of aircraft, and it does so without your tail number appearing next to the words 'for sale'. On a $5M aircraft the second route is often not a preference but a requirement.

A serious offer arrives with a deposit into escrow, a defined inspection scope and a timeline. Anything without those three is a conversation, not an offer. The letter of intent is where the deal is genuinely made: it fixes the price, the deposit, the inspection facility and scope, who pays for what, what counts as a discrepancy the seller must correct, the delivery condition, and the walk-away rights. Negotiate the LOI properly and the rest of the sale is administration. Rush it and every ambiguity resurfaces during inspection, with your aircraft already in pieces at someone else's facility.

This is where most deals die. The buyer's inspection will produce a discrepancy list — every aircraft produces one — and the fight is over which items are airworthiness discrepancies the seller must correct and which are wants the buyer would like fixed at your expense. If the LOI defined that boundary, this stage is mechanical. If it did not, you are negotiating from inside a hangar with your aircraft opened up and a buyer who now knows more about it than you do.

Closing runs through escrow: funds and title move together, never separately. Expect a title search and lien release, the bill of sale, deregistration from the current registry and registration in the new one, an export certificate of airworthiness if the aircraft is leaving the country, insurance ending at the right moment rather than a day early, and the physical handover of every logbook and record you assembled in stage three. Cross-border sales add tax, customs and registry timing that should have been mapped weeks earlier, not discovered here.