From a technical perspective, would you buy an old Zlin Z142 in 2025?
Hello everyone!
I am trying to find an aircraft for CPL hour building and I keep seeing these old Z142s on sale from an ATO in Hungary. They're fairly affordable but I have no experience with this type, so naturally started researching only and asking around, and I see all sorts of strange flags, for instance:
- don't get it because it eats up a ton of fuel - well, in eco cruise seems to guzzle about 60L/h at like 120kts at 8000 ft, that's obviously more than twice the consumption of a Rotax 912 ULS but all CS23 Rotax planes I can find are priced at over 100k so I'm basically saving a lot of money to pay for fuel especially considering I'll be getting fuel with a major tax reduction. Yes there's also the pollution which is a big issue I don't know how to address yet except getting rid of it as soon as I do my time...
- don't buy one because they burn AVGAS and you can't find it anymore - right, I guess all other AVGAS-guzzling oldies will stop flying too?
- don't do it, they're like 50 years old, must be trash, you'll just die - they've been under CAMO, full logs, seller and maintenance org say they're fully airworthy
- some guy died in a Z142 some time ago because of a cracked wing spar so you'll just die too - Is there any aircraft type in which nobody ever died at some point? except maybe those 300k ultralights they sell like 5-10 a decade...
- maintenance is expensive - is there any aircraft that's cheap to maintain (rhetorical question)? I still save a lot in the front end, will maintenance work for like 800-1000 flight hours set me back more than I'm saving?
- good engineers are hard to find - after some digging with the Google shovel I saw there are apparently 2 serious orgs that work on Z142s in Europe
- oh it's a school plane, must be trash by now because of all the students who plowed the fields with them tractors - actually a reasonable argument
- it's not cool, it's an old piece of junk (actual argument from a guy at an ATO) - alright
- you have to do a lot of paperwork to register and be able to fly the aircraft - I'm sure this isn't Z142-specific
- it's hard to fly, our school's flying-gimmick-at-250EUR-per-hour is easier - well yes you know what, you're actually right, thank you, much appreciated
... and so on so forth. Basically everyone I ask that have anything to do with a school or renter will come up with a ton of reasons for me not to buy them, and everyone else I ask just don't know - most people haven't flown one. Some of the older pilots I've met were enthusiastic and said the Z142 is awesome, I'm not doubting that, but they couldn't answer questions about maintenance and the like.
So I guess my question is: would you buy a Z142? and why, or why not?
Thank you very much in advance for any thoughts/input