We will soon be offering a new service called "Deal or No Deal" that will help us protect a broader range of aircraft buyers.

Over the last nine years, many of our clients have said how much they appreciate being told NO! Here's one example https://www.twinandturbine.com/and-then-there-was-one/

We have saved our clients millions of dollars by saying NO to deals they shouldn't do!

I've explored different ways that we could expand our service offerings to help more buyers, especially buyers who are interested in piston airplanes and other aircraft for which we do not offer acquisition services, I think I've found the ideal way to accomplish our goal of protecting buyers, over the next few weeks we'll be adding the details to our website and getting the process and paperwork set up. I'll keep you guys posted!

Just how blatantly promotional does a thread have to be before the BT admins decide it is too much?

Imagine if all the sponsors with those little adverts on the right side of the page posted things like this. What would that mean for BT?

Mike C.

Mike… we have been over this.

I am a sponsor and this is perfectly acceptable.

I’ve tolerated you trashing every thread I start. Enough is enough. Please stop.

Give it a rest, please.

I thought that paying for a BT sponsorship specifically allowed "commercial" posts???

Last time I read one of Chip’s posts that little banner under his name said BT Sponsor. Whether you like him or not, he pays so I don’t get crappy pop-up ads for a porn or gambling site OR telling me my Facebook account is hacked and I need to call 888-Scam-mer.
…and I don’t even have Facebook.

In your boxing match, that was a haymaker that missed the mark and disturbed only the molecules of air. You’re better than that, Mike. Much better than that and wicked smart! Heck, I wouldn’t even engage in a sparring match with you because I would lose before the bell rang.

…back to watching y’all’s stellar mental pugilism in the other threads…

Chip,

The PAAO attempted something similar with the Instant Aircraft Analyzer wherein we provided a simple risk analysis (green, yellow & red indication) based on the parameters they provided. Some folks find it more helpful than others.

Keep us informed. I would be curious to see what you folks develop and I agree that sometimes paying for someone to tell you NO is well worth it!

Good luck.

I think the biggest challenge with any numbers-only review of downmarket (compared to turbine) aircraft is that you find many more examples of airplanes maintained with a bic pen. It gets tough to make any real judgement without seeing the example in person. You will certainly find some planes that are clearly a "no" but you will fail to catch a lot of dogs too.

Yep, that’s going to be really challenging on the piston side, it’s my hope that we can give some guidance to buyers so that they know how to move forward properly. I suspect in pistons we’ll give more free advice than paid advice, but I want to try it and see how much help we can provide.

I’m fortunate to have a great team in place to be able to handle this type of project.

I think on the turbine side we will be able to help some people and offer a very good value proposition.

Thanks Mike, I’ll keep you posted, could be some opportunity for us to work together!

Start your own forum and make your own rules, or buy out the Jeff's so you can run this one. Until then, THEY get to decide what kind of commercial posts their SPONSORS are allowed to make.

Personally, I would have permanently banned you for harassing a sponsor. Hopefully they will do just that.

I like the idea, except it shouldn't just be Chip's opinion. Every for sale listing should have "Deal / No Deal" radio button at the top where we can all vote on it.

$85 per month will buy the ability to have commercial posts as a BT sponsor. For that cost, you will, apparently, have the ability to post commercially oriented content in the forums without limits.

There are 81,000 BT members. Let's say half are reasonably active. That's 25 cents per member for an entire year for this access, a huge deal. Aviation oriented companies can't buy that kind of quality exposure anywhere else for that price.

Given that, it is clear the most effective marketing plan for a general aviation oriented business is to become a BT sponsor and start posting numerous promotional threads on their products, or at the very least, post threads to maintain a high profile and awareness among the members. This will be far more cost effective than a booth at Oshkosh, ads in a flying magazine, search engine optimizations, etc. BT is a concentrated collection of very active GA people, a super high quality platform. Those are the eyeballs the vendors want, and that is what the admins are selling.

Chip has figured that out. Unlike the other sponsors who rarely post any threads and tend to helpfully use the forums as customer support more than anything else, he uses the forum as a marketing vehicle by creating numerous threads to display his expertise and business offerings. He creates about 1 new thread per week doing this. No other BT sponsor comes anywhere close to that rate of promotion and thread generation.

What happens if the ~75 BT sponsors all acting the same? That would be about 3000 new threads that are commercially motivated per year appearing in the forum, roughly 1 in 3 new threads would be commercial at that point. And there is apparently no mechanism or rule to limit that from increasing or more sponsors showing up.

BT has a super high signal to noise ratio almost unheard of on the Internet for a free forum. It is THE premier general aviation forum on the web. If it gets too polluted with commercial posts, that will reduce its value. The admins are walking a fine line between money and content here, and I think they know that. Ultimately you can't always choose money over content because content is what brings in the money.

I have no issue with the banner and margin ads, BT should make all they can from those, but the forum is primarily a member to member mechanism and if the gets commercialize too much, it will lose that value in my opinion.

Had Chip bought a banner ad announcing his new service (which costs a LOT more, BTW), that would be fine and dandy with me. But given the low cost to post in the forum, he can circumvent that with a post. In some sense, if the admins want more money, they need to make commercial forum posting more expansive since that's the cheap backdoor way to our eyeballs.

If the admins want to ban me permanently, go ahead. Its their platform, they make the rules. But the value that is BT is precious and it doesn't take much to jump the shark and lose it. When organizations start suppressing criticisms of themselves is when they start to go downhill.

Let's see if enough people can vote this post down to make it the record worst post on BT. I don't know what that is presently.

Mike C.

LOL, you missed that one by a mile!

You have posted this same BS over and over in Chips threads for years now. Obviously the people who own the forum do not agree with what you want. Give it up already.

I have 7000 post and I’ve been a member longer than Mike. He has over 19,000 post.

I actually try very hard to create threads that are engaging and informative. Our business is very low volume and we stay booked solid with clients, so I’m not on here trolling for business. The Deal or No Deal is something our team came up with in our Thursday morning meeting, I’m excited about it because it may be a way to help a much broader range of people, so I posted it here to get feedback.

Over a year ago, I posted about our sister company that digitizes logbooks, got feedback, and haven’t posted about it again. That business is where all of our marketing effort goes, it is not limited by capacity or by aircraft type. Literally every person on Beechtalk is a potential customer… and I don’t promote it on here at all. Why? Because Mile is 100% wrong about me. I do not want to see Beechtalk trashed.

Beechtalk is a group of people I enjoy a great deal. If I post a new thread, it is usually because Beechtalk has become boring!


The fact of the matter is the main reason everybody knows who I am on Beechtalk is because Mike’s Ciholas is always going back-and-forth with me. He’s actually causing what he says he doesn’t want to see happen!


And the crazy thing is, I enjoy it. Beechtalk is like an addiction to me, my wife calls it my mistress! I check Beechtalk multiple times a day, just to see what’s going on! It’s sort of like a neighborhood barbecue. Friends, foes, and a few people that’ve had too much to drink!