Most guides to buying a pre-owned aircraft read like a legal checklist. Step one, define your mission. Step two, set your budget. By step four, you’ve already lost the thread of what actually matters.
The real process of buying a private jet is messier, more nuanced, and far more dependent on who is in your corner than any checklist will tell you.
A Focus on the Maintenance and Pedigree
It is easy to walk into the market focused on the interior and the paint. However, those are fixable and relatively affordable to address. What is easy to miss without technical expertise is where an aircraft sits in its maintenance cycle.
Every aircraft has a lifecycle. Where it sits in that cycle at the time of purchase determines what it will cost you in years one, two, and three of ownership. A jet that looks impeccable in the listing photos might be due for a C check next year, which could cost $1 million.
A Commitment to Real Aircraft Due Diligence
The private aviation market is largely unregulated. There is no licensing board for aircraft brokers, so anyone can put on a suit and call themselves an aviation expert. Some of them are excellent. But many of them have never evaluated a logbook or physically inspected an aircraft, and would not recognize a deferred airworthiness directive if it were flagged in writing.
This matters because the complexity in an aircraft transaction is not in the paperwork. It is in the aircraft itself. When vetting an airplane for a buyer, it’s important not to rely on a seller’s summary.
At Swartz, we physically travel to wherever the aircraft is–anywhere in the world–review the records ourselves, and assess the asset with trained eyes. From our perspective, it is not possible to look a buyer in the face and say “this is a good deal” if you have not personally reviewed what you are selling.
What the Pre-Purchase Inspection Is Actually For
The pre-purchase inspection is the most consequential step in any private jet sale. It is not a formality. It is where transactions are made, remade, or killed, and where buyers without experienced representation get hurt.
Here is a real example: We recently had a buyer submit a lowball offer on one of our Bombardier listings and requested a Level 3 pre-purchase inspection. The problem is that this aircraft had just completed its largest scheduled inspection less than a month before. A Level 3 is essentially a complete gut job that takes four months at a Bombardier facility. And in this case, it was not appropriate given the aircraft’s maintenance status. In addition, this is a tactic sometimes used by predatory brokers looking to buy, whose goal is to run up costs, create leverage, and either steal the aircraft at a discount or walk away after burning the seller’s time.
If a seller does not have someone in their corner who understands what an appropriate inspection scope looks like, given an aircraft’s specific history, it could cost them.
On the buy side, that kind of representation and offer can unnecessarily cost them the aircraft.
At Swartz, we don’t just send a client’s aircraft to an inspection facility and wait for a report. We oversee the entire maintenance event. When discrepancies come back, we are behind the scenes reviewing each one, verifying that they are legitimate, that the pricing and labor hours are appropriate, and that the proposed corrective action actually makes sense for this aircraft.
Understanding the Letter of Intent: Soft Deals, Hard Deals, and What Changed After COVID
The standard deal structure in aircraft sales works like this: a buyer submits a Letter of Intent, puts down a deposit that is fully refundable, and then proceeds through the pre-purchase inspection. Once the inspection is complete, the buyer reviews the findings and, if they are acceptable, signs a technical acceptance. At that point, the deposit goes non-refundable. That is a soft deal, and it is the appropriate structure for most transactions.
During the COVID aircraft shortage, that changed. Inventory dried up, demand spiked, and sellers started requiring what we call hard deals, meaning the deposit becomes non-refundable the moment the purchase agreement is signed, before any inspection has taken place. If the market tanked the next day, the buyer’s money was already gone.
That era has passed, but hard-deal expectations linger, particularly with European sellers. Buyers who don’t have a knowledgeable advisor pushing back on their behalf can still find themselves locked into unfavorable structures. We routinely walk away from hard deal offers because there are enough options in the used aircraft for sale market right now that most buyers don’t need that kind of exposure.
What Closing Actually Involves
Closing a private jet transaction is not like closing on a house. It should involve everything from ensuring the aircraft is free of liens to managing the exchange of funds and documents. Depending on how the buyer is structured–as an individual, a company, or a trust–the registration and regulatory filings will look different.
For corporate buyers, especially, there are often multiple layers involved: a director of aviation, a CFO, legal counsel, and outside aviation law firms. We have worked with clients ranging from individual buyers purchasing their first jet to large organizations whose aircraft transactions involve the full gamut.
Closing is also not the finish line. The transition into operation matters: crew ratings, insurance placement, hangar arrangements, maintenance program enrollment, and FAA compliance all should be in place before the first flight under your ownership, and you shouldn’t need to coordinate those details on your own.
Choosing the Right Representation
There is a distinction in the aviation industry worth understanding before you enter the market. A broker represents clients in transactions but does not own inventory. A dealer, like Swartz Aviation, actually buys and holds aircraft. We have purchased distressed aircraft, completed major maintenance on our own dime, and sold them.
Why does that matter to you as a buyer? Because we feel the same pain you do. When a maintenance shop quotes us $X on a project, and the final bill comes in at $X plus 40%, we are the ones writing that check. We know exactly how those numbers creep. We know which shops are running efficiently and which are not. We know when a shop wants to escalate a corrosion issue to factory engineering (which costs $10,000 just to get a report) when the Structural Repair Manual already has a published, approved fix for that exact issue.
That kind of knowledge does not come from being a broker. It comes from being an owner.
Ready to buy an aircraft without the stress?
Schedule a Consultation with our team or give us a call today: (940) 455-2900
