An old TV show filmed in Apple Valley CA. Sky King chased bad guys in a Bamboo Bomber, an aircraft the lead actor owned. In the second season Cessna gave the show a sexy Cessna 310.
UC-78B Bamboo Bomber | Museum of Aviation
museumofaviation.org
I'm not, c'mon, everyone likes the MD-11!
Parts might be hard to buy. Back in the olden days when all I had to worry about was the part that controlled the spinny bit out front either on the wings or on the nose warbirds were a significant source of income for the company, but props and controls for C-130s and P-3s were what paid my salary and kept the lights on. Well maybe that and the warehouse full of OEM new WW2 prop and prop control parts and assemblies that the owners father purchased just after the war. Anyways, we did a good portion of the entire nationwide and a bunch of international firebomber propeller work and the OV-10 had gained popularity as either a lead plane or command plane, apparently the prop governors were hard to get. I was told there was only one test bench and it was at NAS China Lake, my bosses looked at this as an opportunity to profit. A search for a test bench began, because even if we could get the bits and pieces we needed to either repair or overhaul these units it made no sense to pursue it if we'd have to send them to China Lake for certification. The search was fruitless, that bench out in the desert produced a product absolutely unavailable anywhere else, this news seemed to only excite the owner when our sales guy told him we couldn't do it and a meeting was called. The owner told us, the sales guy, my boss ( a dear friend, RIP. ), the other shop foreman and me that we would build our own test bench from scratch. He would hire engineers to accomplish this he said, this was met with some resistance from us. We were accustomed to using surplus OEM test equipment, there was zero grey area. The bench I used for a C-130/P-3 control had the footprint of a huge sectional couch built for a giant and went almost to the ceiling. The bench I used to test the valve housing from that control by itself was probably 2/3s the size of the big bench. There were a couple of other benches in that room, a machine to test the synchronizers for the piston stuff, and of course the governor test bench. Point is these machines were all built by the manufacturers, the governor bench had been testing governors since the war ( I used it to test P-38 governors, Curtiss Electric, when was last time you heard that name? ). The owner was the sort of person who during his divorce lived in his backyard in a tent and would occasionally show up in a '46 MG with a giant teddy bear in the passenger seat, which would have been funny if he did it once. We built the bench, and I built and tested governors. Customers were happy, I hated everything about it so I quit with no prospects. Sometimes you just can't. After almost 7 years they were talking about me taking over my bosses job, Sorry nope. Sadly they went out of business.
What about the 228NG
I have to agree with how you assessed this.
My hangar neighbor did a great write up between the 400, TTx and the SR22. The 400, dollar for lbs of usefulness is your best bet.
Never understood why Cessna bought that model only to destroy it.
