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Recently, I sat down to chat with them about their Malibu and life after Southwest.
Dianne: Let’s talk about your decision to buy the Malibu as a replacement for your Cardinal. Describe your process of arriving at the decision the Malibu was the right fit for you.
Dean & Tammie Jo: While we both have been involved in aviation for over 35 years, very little of our flight time had been in GA aircraft until about five years ago. We both cut our teeth in the Beechcraft T-34C Turbo Mentor in the U.S. Navy aviation program and progressed from that turboprop into the fighter jet world
of A-7s and F/A-18s and then into Boeing 737s at Southwest Airlines.
We have always loved aviation, but we didn’t have a mission that justified the expense of owning an aircraft until our son wanted to learn to fly and our daughter wanted to go to college out of state. That lead us to our first plane, a 1976 Cardinal RG, and we fell in love, not only with the plane but with the freedom the GA world offered. The Cardinal RG served our purposes well for several years, but over time our mission changed. Our son earned his Private Pilot License and moved on to the Air Force Academy and Tammie Jo had an interesting day at work on April 17, 2018 as the captain of Southwest Airlines flight 1380. That spawned a new chapter in life of speaking around the country, and we found ourselves needing more speed, more useful load, and more weather capability. The search was on for an aircraft that fit our new mission, as well as our budget.
We started the process by clearly defining our new requirements. First, we wanted to be able to carry 850 pounds, or four average size adults and some luggage. We also wanted
a decent range, which is a rather nebulous criteria, so we settled on 625 nm. Purely coincidentally, that is the distance from our home airport to Colorado Springs, home of the Air Force Academy and our son. We also
Dean and Tammie Jo Shults
wanted an expanded weather enve- lope, which turned into the require- ments for pressurization and FIKI. Finally, we had to fit all of this into our budget, which we knew would limit us to piston-engine aircraft.
We investigated a few pressur-
ized six seat piston twins that met,
or nearly met, our payload and range requirements. However, when the payload was reduced to allow for full fuel, the range only increased another 100 or maybe 200 miles.
Then we discovered the Piper Malibu. It was pressurized. It had known icing capability. It had six seats as well as two cargo compartments capable of carrying 200 pounds worth of stuff, one of which is large enough to handle golf clubs and the other is
in the pressurized cabin, preventing the toothpaste explosion that occurs when taking a non-pressurized plane into the flight levels. It could handle our 850 lb/625 nm requirements with IFR reserves, even with some head- wind. And, to top it off, if we traded payload for fuel, we could go 1,400 nm instead of the 750 or 800 nm the twins offered. We were sold!
Dianne: After settling on the PA46, describe finding this perfect-for- you airplane.
Dean & Tammie Jo: Our budget lim- ited us to older Malibu’s which turned
out to be the perfect fit. After doing some research and online shopping,
I made a call about a plane listed by Casey Aviation and ended up having
a wonderful conversation with Joe Casey. Joe shared a wealth of informa- tion about all things Malibu. We dis- cussed original Malibu’s vs Mirages, Lycoming vs Continental engines, Gar Kenyon vs Parker-Hannifin land-
ing gear, electric vs hydraulic flaps, 2-blade vs 3-blade vs 4-blade props, hot plate vs a heated windscreen,
etc. You get the picture. It was an eye opening Malibu education, and it helped us narrow our search down to a 1987 or 1988 model with a Continental TSIO-520 engine.
After some more concentrated searching, we found one in our price range that was a bit of a diamond in the rough: a 1987 with no damage history and a fairly low time airframe (3,400 hours) that had been main- tained by a reputable Malibu shop
in Florida. The downside was a tired original paint job with some small patches of corrosion beginning to form, a dated and worn original interior, and an instrument panel with some original equipment and some aging upgrades. While it wasn’t very pretty, it was operational and appeared to be mechanically sound, so we decided to take the plunge with the idea that, if it turned out to be
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