Why I love The Japanese

I’m holding a little airplane fire sale – I’m selling my little toy that I’ve had for a couple of years – the one right over here that just looks cool as all hell. Go on, admit it, you want one too. Sadly, the reason I’m selling it is that I’m just not flying it enough – I’ve competed in aerobatics for about 10 years, and I’m kind of looking for a different kind of airplane, one that is a little more comfortable and not quite so purpose-built for aerobatic competition. The Pitts is a great airplane if you want to turn upside-down a lot (which I did); if you want to go from point A to point B and just have some fun doing so, not so much: it’s cramped, noisy and has no heating system, making flying in winter an exercise in dressing in multiple layers. Ever felt 12 degrees Fahrenheit outside? Mix in colder air 6000ft up and a 200mph wind coming at you through air vents and you have the makings of a fairly chilly experience.

As with all things of reasonably high value, it takes some time to sell an airplane. Quite apart from that, the potential market for airplanes is smaller than that for, oh, cars. Or bicycles. For that matter, its smaller than the market for a USB pole dancer.

When you get right down to it, the market for selling small 2-seater aerobatic airplanes with no heating systems in the middle of winter is vanishingly small, and you’re probably selling to an audience somewhere around the 600 person mark worldwide. Naturally that makes things a little complicated.

Fortunately there are places – like Trade-a-Plane and Barnstormers – that have a global presence due to the fact that they’re online publications, which means that you wind up getting calls from strange places like Canada, Guatemala, Adelaide NSW, Poland, Italy, France, Wisconsin and Japan.

What is remarkable is the difference in attitude between people of different national origin. Europeans in general want to know if you’ll fly it across the Atlantic for them (umm, no, not in a Pitts). Americans and Canadians act as though they’re doing you a favor by calling you up and expressing interest in purchasing your aircraft. So much so, in fact, that they want you to jump through all sorts of interesting little hoops in addition to the complexities of an aircraft sale. Like accommodating their request to examine the airplane at 9:30pm in February when it’s 12F out. In an unheated hanger. And then they try to lowball you with an offer insultingly low.

Which brings me to the Japanese.

I’ve just had the distinct pleasure of meeting two Japanese gentlemen who are seriously interested in buying my toy. I was exchanging email with them 2 days ago and mentioned that I had some other interested buyers. Their response? “We’ll be there on Friday to look at the airplane. If we like it, we’ll buy it if you can hold the airplane for us”. Friday arrived, and the buyers showed up, looked at the airplane, decided that they wanted to take pictures of it with one of them inside and me standing next to it, and were unfailingly polite, pleasant and fun to interact with. I can’t say that about 95% of the other people I’ve dealt with in my airplane selling history.

The icing on the cake came when the potential buyer said to me that he had brought me a little gift from Japan. Just think about that for a second – this guy had just traveled for about 24 hours to look at an airplane owned by someone he had never, ever met before, and he came bearing gifts. When last has anyone that you’ve only potentially sold something to brought you a gift? And what was the gift, you may ask? It was a box of Hello Kitty pastry snacks available only in Japan. Probably one of the coolest gifts I’ve gotten in a long time:

The Hello Kitty Box	The contents
Small Kitties	Big Kitties
The label. Note the For Sale In Japan Only text.

We’ve been munching on these after dinner and they’re really quite enjoyable.

In other news, Kerry thought that she’d tell me about some old advertisement. I’m including it here so that you can see how innocent my response was. As you can tell from the picture, this is nothing more than the way things should be, and I reflected that thought in my casual comment of “Ahh, the good old days. When men were men and women were grateful!”. I’m still recovering from the beating she administered seconds after I said that. There’s no justice in the world.