This is the story of owning and operating a 1993 Beech Bonanza A36 in the UK and some of its adventures.
Welcome to my blog about owning and operating a Beech Bonanza A36 model. I am writing this blog because I know I would find it interesting so I hope some other people will. I hope to tell the readers (if there are any) about what it is like to own a high performance piston single plane and what it costs.
Just a bit of background first.
I purchased the Bonanza in July 2004 after the number of seats in my Cessna 182 was exceeded by the number of children myself and my girlfriend decided to have. We used to seat 3 small children in the back of the 182 which wasnt great but it was OK but then when my good lady got number 4 in her oven I started looking around for a replacement. I was also looking for something with a good increase in speed if I was going to spend more money.
The first six seater I tried was a 2002 Beech Bonanza A36 which was lovely but was way beyond my budget. I was however taken with the superb build quality after owning a Cessna and the club seating in the back with a wide loading door.
Because I had been so happy with the Cessna 182 however I decided to stick with the brand and spent months looking at Cessna 210's (A six seat 182 with a bit more power) and even looked at a pressurised 210 but I came to realise that to get my family into a 210 was going to take some amazing acrobatics . As one of our children is severely disabled with cerebral palsy I started to realise this may be the wrong choice and I could help thinking about how nice the A36 Bonanza felt. I did look at other planes but nothing (possibly apart from a Malibu) was going to satisfy me so we started our quest to find a Bonanza.
An excellent company marketed my 182, Aradian Aviation and there rep called Paul who knows everything about just about every plane in the world it seems suggested that he knew where there was just the Bonanza for me. The only thing was that it was in Germany, Berlin to be precise. Twice as expensive as I had budgeted and a lot newer, 1993 and with only 500 hours. None the less we dutifully trooped off to Berlin and agreed to buy the plane after a lot of haggling. That was how I ended up with N345SF on the U.S. but now that brings another story.
