Sedgwick County buying a $1.6 million plane; here’s why you never want to ride in it
In a whirlwind transaction, Sedgwick County voted to buy a $1.6 million airplane Wednesday.
But you probably won’t ever want to fly in it.
The plane, a 1988 Beechcraft King Air, will go to the Sheriff’s Office for use as a long-distance transport for prisoners.
The county aircraft is used to pick up criminal suspects wanted in Wichita-area crimes but arrested in other states, said Sheriff Jeff Easter.
The county has to pick up suspects “all over the U.S.,” Easter said. “We’re in Spokane today.”
The plane has a design capacity of 12-16 passengers, but the most the county ever flies is seven.
That includes two pilots up front. The department sends one transport deputy to guard single prisoners in the air and two if there’s more than one prisoner. While prisoners are usually picked up one at a time, the department tries to combine trips and might make pickups in different states if it’s not too far out of the way.
The plane the county is buying, currently hangared in Phoenix, has several advantages over the 1975 Rockwell Commander that the county’s flying now, Easter said.
The Beechcraft plane is 13 years newer, which is a plus.
Parts are no longer made for the Commander, so the only option now is remanufactured parts that don’t last as long, Easter said.
“After the last maintenance inspection, the aircraft was already having mechanical issues on the flight back to Wichita,” he said.
Also, Beechcraft is headquartered in Wichita, so the county won’t have to fly to Indiana for maintenance or Florida for pilot training as it does with the Commander.
The county had previously authorized spending $1.5 million from the fleet budget for a replacement plane. Easter needed another $100,000 to buy the King Air.
“Just like the housing market, the aircraft market is doing really well and prices have gone up, and we cannot find an aircraft,” Easter said. “The two times that we have located aircraft that would fit into closely our budget, we went out to RFP (request for proposals) and they sold already.”
Easter said his department was primed to ask for additional funding to buy a 1987 King Air from a company in Newton for about $1.9 million.
But a sale contract on the plane in Phoenix fell through on Tuesday, he said. “They called us to see if we were still interested and we said we were,” he said.
The County Commission on Wednesday approved up to $390,000 additional funding, so the sheriff could buy the Newton plane right away if the Phoenix plane were to be sold before the county could ink a deal.
Easter said late Wednesday that he hadn’t yet gotten confirmation on the purchase of the Phoenix plane, but that his deputies had been in contact with the dealer during the day and he was optimistic that sale was going through.
The overall cost will likely be offset by about $500,000 when the county sells the Commander, he said.
