High insurance rates are common for the latest high priced “Shiny machine”, especially if it sports a tailwheel. Unfortunately, some new owners get either a “quickie” check out, or none at all. Those often end up in a ball, and the rest of the owners of the type pay more to cover the losses.
Alaska is a special case, partially because much of AK is public lands, and, while aircraft operations are legal, if you break it out there, it must be removed, and that can get expensive due to distances and helicopter costs. A gentleman in the Mat Valley who recently was killed made a good living for years with a restricted category Huey, in large part retrieving bent planes.
I carried liability only on my Cessna 170 when it went to floats in Fairbanks. My intent was to Do float ratings in it. With a ~ $50K hull value, hull insurance would have been well over $6K. This was no student solo, and me as instructor with several thousand hours seaplane time. Why? High risk.
A nosewheel airplane is almost assuredly going to fall into a different insurance category as compared to a nearly identical tailwheel version. The nosewheel mostly eliminates those pesky “loss of control on ground” accidents that tailwheel types feature prominently in accident statistics.
Maule has built both nosewheel and tailwheel versions that are otherwise identical of some of their models for quite a few years. Tailwheel Maules are well known to be costly to insure, so a comparison between gear configurations there may be instructive.
But I’ll bet the nosewheel versions are going to be cheaper to insure.
MTV
