Complaint Review: Tim Pacini - Daytona Beach Florida

This all happened over a period of about a year.  Sorry it's such a long story, but it needs to be told.

I am a recent aviation college graduate.  I had my resume up online.  I got an email response from Karla Pacini (Tim Pacini's wife and accountant) of Advanced Generators.  She said they were looking for a CFI to "maintain their two 172's".  I went in and had an interview with Tim and they "hired" me.

About a week later, Tim "has an idea" for me to buy the planes for $35,000 each and start my own banner tow business.  He claimed to have been ripped off when selling his old banner tow business (Aerial Messages), but I'm sure that was just one of his many lies.  Anyway, he was really nice, he filled me full of hope, told me it'd be easy to start the business because the plane had already been a banner tow plane in the past, he showed me how many hundreds of thousands of dollars I could make doing it and assured me he'd help me however he could along the way, including getting my banner tow training for free.

When I mentioned I wanted to get the plane appraised, he offered to "save me some money" by just going to talk to the guy that he bought the planes from.  Phil Gardner of Gardner Aircraft Sales at the Spruce Creek Fly-in.  I thought surely the aircraft dealer knew exactly how much they're worth.  Phil told me that the planes were each worth between $35,000 and $38,000.  We agreed that I would do owner financing on one of the airplanes and once the business picked up and I was making money, I'd buy the other one.  I begged and borrowed $10,000 from my parents to get things going.  About 2 months before the busy season for banner towing started, I put $5,000 down on the plane and started paying $500/month, being assured I'd be ready in time.

I wasn't... You need a special "waiver" to pull banners with a plane.  Tim assured me that would be no problem.  Well, it took 3 and a half months for the FAA to even LOOK at my waiver application and another 2 months for them to send someone from Orlando to New Smyrna (about an hour drive) to inspect the plane.  The inspection went badly.  The plane had a long list of discrepancies the FAA wanted fixed before they would allow me to tow banners with it.  Tim went ahead and found a different buyer for the other plane.  The radios were mostly inoperable, so in the contract, it was agreed that the seller would have the radios working properly again within 30 days of signing the contract.  6 months later, they took them in to the shop to get "fixed", but they NEVER ended up WORKING properly.  He was supposed to replace the battery (which was old and out of use) as well.  He told me to just put some water in it and it'd be fine.  It still crapped out after sitting just 2 days.  Then he only wanted to pay half on a new battery.

By this time, the busy season was over, the plane still couldn't do anything to generate revenue, I was almost out of money, the annual was almost due and I started reading all the bad reviews about Tim.  Figuring the business probably wasn't gonna work at this point, I thought maybe I could break even if I just sold the plane off to someone else.  I decided to use a credit card and go ahead and get it officially appraised.

Appraised value of N6920H, the plane I was paying Tim Pacini $35,000 for: $10,278!!!  Tim Pacini was scamming me for $25,000!!!

By this time I had already invested over $9,000 into the plane and about $8,000 in insurance, tie-down fees, a storage truck and other business-related assets.  The only choice I had was to give him a chance to renegotiate the deal.  Instead, he started blaming me for everything that went wrong.  He blamed me for the business failing, for the radios not working, for the FAA taking so long and for not flying the plane enough.  He claimed that he DID try to do everything to help me, but I "wouldn't remember" my facts, when he actually kept giving me conflicting information.  Even when I sat in front of him writing everything down he would say something different when I read it back to him to verify it was correct.  He claimed that he thought I got a full appraisal from Phil Gardner and that he was not willing renegotiate.  Even when faced with the facts in black and white, he would not man up.

Well, I'm out about $17,000 thanks to Tim Pacini.  Apparently the current owner of Aerial Messages got ripped off by about $30,000 when buying the company from Tim too.  Next time I'll be more careful.

Other shady facts about my experience:

Tim had me insure the plane (worth $10,278) for $50,000 and put his company as the lien holder. One of Tim's old employees died flying one of his old planes (aileron failure), probably also over-insured... Convenient? You do the math... I was eventually scarred to death to get that thing off the ground.

None of Tim's "friends" or "connections" ever had ANYTHING good to say about him except that he was a good business man. I could tell that for myself, he's a VERY good business man, as long as you exclude ethics from the definition of a "good business man". He knows how to hide his assets so when he gets sued, it looks like he has no money or possessions to get sued for, even though he lived in a $500,000 home in New Smyrna.  He knows how to manipulate people to do what he wants them to do too.

Tim's wife, Karla Pacini is just as bad.  She was also really nice until I started trying to collect on their end of the contract.

Tim showed me hundreds of pictures of banners being picked up by his planes.  Apparently Tim would take pictures of the banner being picked up and use that as "proof" that the banner was pulled.  The plane would then just drop the banner right back off and not actually pull it along it's assigned route.

Tim keeps a shotgun next to his desk for protection, since he has apparently made A LOT of enemies.  Yes, seriously.

If you read other reviews about him, you'll see there are NUMEROUS charges against him.  I have not officially checked.

I would not be surprised if Tim Pacini gave Phil Gardner $1,000 just to lead me into this. As far as I'm concerned Phil Gardner is just as bad.

They really had me fooled.  Tim and Karla both seemed so nice and eager to help me, but it was all just a show.  They don't care about anything but themselves.