We scoped things out this morning, and it is just so sad to see 388 helpless on its back.
The wings are a little rumpled, the empennage is not quite straight or solid, ...
Kevin, the mechanic, was out this morning and he figures the insurance adjustor will total it, saying the wings will have to be wholly replaced and that fixing the empennage is a labor-intensive (read: expensive) job. Who knows about water and other damage to the avionics or interior in general. And we just did the annual a week ago! It's a 1968 172 with a current estimated value of $30-34k, so it probably won't take a whole lot of estimated repairs to get to that amount.
John, an instructor who lives to fly and just a super guy, had his tail-dragger parked down a few spaces. His was upside-down also. Kevin explained to us that it didn't flip tail-over-head like ours did, but flipped wing-over-wing, over a neighboring plane, taking out one plane's tail and damaging another to come to its resting point. After snapping the tie-downs. Rumpled wings, shattered windscreen, twisted empennage, ...
(John's plane is the white and blue one on the far right. It had been parked on the other side of the orange 172. The orange plane and the gray-and-yellow one facing the hangars had their tails clipped by it. The plane on the left has some holes in its skin. The plane in the foreground is in much the same condition as ours; this guy restored the interior himself a few years ago, replacing seats, doing the leather upholstery and interior panel coverings himself. So sad.)
Charlie, one of the linemen, said that non-owners were being turned away from the airport today, and that at one point there were ~75 cars stacked up of people coming to gawk. Kevin said there was one resident plane out on the ramp not damaged (out of probably 20); it just so happens to be the one plane that has never, ever moved the entire time we've been associated with the airport. Perhaps it's fused to the pavement.
All of the flight school's single-engine planes were damaged; luckily their twin so far appears to be ok. The handful of planes in the transient parking on the other side of the terminal also seem to have survived.
I'm so sorry for you-
ReplyDeleteYou get accustomed to the quirks of your machine, and you've done some work to customize 388 to do what you wanted it to do. It'll be sad if they total it, but I bet that's exactly what will happen. Can you buy it back for the salvage value and rebuild it yourself?
Some years ago I owned a 152 that I had leased back to a school in "Bigtown",
2 hours away by car. Woke one morning after a particularly nasty/windy storm to catch the morning TV news and heard the report that one airplane at XYZ airport had torn loose from one of it's tiedowns and was flipped onto it's back. I looked at Sara Jean and said, "We own an airplane at XYZ", and I had just gotten the words out when the phone rang...
Yep... broke it's back. Totalled!
Bought it back for the salvage value and parted it out. Actually made a little money from bein' in the aviation business!