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The purchase agreement is signed. The pre-buy is behind you. Financing is lined up, escrow has the documents, the hotel is booked, and everyone is working toward the same closing date. Then, four days out, somebody sends a one-line email asking for a certificate of insurance.Most of the time that email is nothing. Once in a while it's the first sign of something that should have been sorted out weeks earlier.Insurance still gets handled as one of the last administrative items in an aircraft purchase, after the airplane, the money and the maintenance are settled. I'd put it near the front instead, because depending on the aircraft it can drive training requirements, who's allowed to fly it, the liability limit you can get, whether the lender's requirements can be met, and how fast the deal can close.That matters most when somebody is stepping up.Take an experienced piston pilot buying a turboprop, or a turboprop owner moving into a light jet. The buyer can be financially qualified, well trained and completely capable of flying the airplane. The insurance market still looks at it differently. It's underwriting a combination: this pilot, in this aircraft, flown the way he says he's going to fly it.Total time is part of that conversation and it's rarely the deciding part. Time in type, recency, training history, claims history, intended use, where the airplane lives, who else will fly it and the limit being requested all move the needle. So does the size of the jump. A pilot with several thousand hours can still be making a real leap in complexity, speed or operating environment, and an underwriter may be fine with that leap and still want simulator training, mentor time, or a second qualified pilot for the first stretch. None of that is a problem until everybody finds out the week of closing.Which is why the insurance conversation should start when you get serious about an airplane, not when you're ready to wire funds. The point that early is to find out what's going to be asked of you while there's still time to do something about it. Binding can wait.Earlier this year, a TBM 940 buyer I later met began looking for insurance on a Tuesday for a Friday closing. He had 1,200 hours, most of it in a Cirrus SR22, and the market wanted him to complete initial training in a simulator and then fly 25 hours with a mentor pilot before going solo. Reasonable ask. But the next school date was six weeks out, and the closest mentor pilot with availability couldn't get to him for eight. He paid a ferry pilot to bring the airplane home and then two months of hangar rent on an airplane he owned and couldn't fly. The requirement wasn't the problem. Learning about it one day before closing was.The pattern repeats in different forms. A buyer weighing two airplanes finds they carry very different training requirements. A first-time turbine owner learns the market wants a second qualified pilot in the right seat for the first season. Another finds the limit his lender requires is hard to place against his pilot profile. None of that kills a deal. Given a few weeks and they're items to work through. Given four days, they're a crisis.The same squeeze shows up when a buyer shops on premium alone. "What does it cost?" is a fair question and a poor first question. The better one is "what will the market require for me to own and operate this airplane the way I intend to?" Once you know that, the premium means something. Until then you're comparing numbers attached to different sets of conditions. A policy can be cheap and still require mentor time the buyer never planned for. Coverage can be available, just not at the limit the lender wants. The aircraft can be insurable even though the operating plan has to change while the pilot builds time.Aircraft brokers help by raising this early. So do lenders, attorneys and management companies. Nobody has to become an insurance expert. It needs to sit on the checklist alongside title, financing, maintenance, tax and escrow instead of floating around as an afterthought.Buyers can help themselves by pulling the file together up front. Pilot records, training history, claims history, expected annual hours, intended use, who else is flying. All of it is easier to work with when it arrives at once rather than in pieces over the final two days.It also helps to be honest with yourself about the jump you're making. If you're going from a piston single into a high-performance turboprop, extra training isn't a term to negotiate down. Often it's the reason an underwriter is willing to write the risk at all. Same story moving into a jet, or from a two-pilot cockpit into single-pilot operations. Better to understand why the requirement is there and build a plan you can live with.One more reason to start early: you have options at the beginning and you don't at the end. Early on you can compare airplanes, training paths, ownership structures and coverage. Late, the question stops being "what's the best way to structure this?" and becomes "how do we make Friday happen?" Nobody negotiates well from there.The industry has gotten fast at the rest of it. Records go out digitally, signatures are electronic, title and escrow turn quickly. Insurance deserves the same head start. Most deals won't hit a real problem. But asking early costs you nothing, and finding out late costs a delayed delivery, an unplanned training bill, or an airplane you can't fly the way you expected for the first few months.A deal isn't done when the price is agreed and the money reaches escrow. It's done when you can take the airplane home and fly it the way you planned to.-Doug Tibbs has spent more than 32 years in aviation, building a career that has taken him from the cockpit to aircraft management, insurance brokerage, underwriting and executive leadership. He has logged more than 6,000 flight hours, flown Part 91 and Part 135 operations around the world, and has more than 25 years of experience in aviation insurance. His career has included serving as Head of General Aviation in the US for one of the world's largest multinational aerospace insurers. Today, Doug serves as Managing Director of 5X5 Aviation Insurance, a direct-to-consumer, pilot-focused MGA.