Aircraft inspection near EDWK

Are there really £3000 of hoses on a TB20?

There are if you go to the “right” company.

There are also 5000 quid annuals which shrink by 50% when you query the bill (again if you use the “right” company).

To be fair, apart from the engine hoses which are of course US-thread and cheap, the TB hoses are ISO (metric) thread and as per normal French practice they come from a French company even if this costs 10x as much (literally; I am not joking). So they are from Aeroquip, now part of Eaton (or is it Parker?), and while you can buy then directly via their dealer network, from say Saywells, when the French outfit see the enquiry they say “screw them, this is a Socata part” and while they can’t officially say that, they quote a 20 week lead time to fob you off. The price is however 1/3 of the Socata price, so if you plan ahead….. as always, the less you know the more you pay. It’s all in my writeup.

However, if the hoses are Teflon they are not life-limited, so I guess in this case it was an old TB with rubber hoses which would have prob99 been life-expired anyway (I would never fly with rubber hoses when the telfon ones cost barely more) and the 3k quote was for teflon hoses with a nice markup on top. They should be about 2k end-user but if the company is not a Socata dealer they would probably pay the end user price and mark that up. If they were Teflon hoses already, the case for replacement was a revenue generation exercise, though arguably prudent on an aircraft with an unknown history (is there an aircraft for sale with a known history? )

In any case the engineer had to go to the USA to actually inspect the aircraft, it was not unreasonable to expect him to check the logs at the same time!

Also, nobody is going to send you photos of a logbook which clearly shows that such and such is beyond TBO or whatever because they know you will just drop it. A huge part of any prebuy inspection, from the seller’s POV, is the “fait accompli” element i.e. once you have travelled all the way there you are very unlikely to go back home without it. What you will prob99 do is to haggle the price down a bit, but that’s OK because most planes sell for 20-30% below the advertised price.

I have no intention of suing my original LAA inspector, but I wonder what form of indemnity an inspector of certified aircraft might carry for a pre-buy inspection?

What aircraft is it? LAA that is experimental, or “permit” as you call it in the UK. An experimental aircraft that has been used a lot is probably the best assurance of a well working and safe experimental aircraft there is. The other stuff you mention are details that are easily “fixed”. Experimentals are not required to use certified parts, and that includes everything from nuts and bolts to complete engines. Fencing wire, cotter pins, locking wire – this means nothing, but if you want things like this done “properly”, it’s up to you. Personally I use AN hardware exclusively. I don’t HAVE to do that, but there really is no good reason not to, and it means less things to worry about.

The engine, I would have replaced though. You can take it apart and “inspect” stuff, but it’s simpler and probably cheaper all in all, to just put in a new one. You don’t know how long it has run or since when it has run. In any case, you can get everything you need here, and it’s all made (or selected) for aircraft use: http://www.greatplainsas.com/

The airworthiness of a certified aircraft is tied to the use of certified parts. For experimentals this is not the case, here the airworthiness is tied to the individual aircraft.

Yes, LAA aircraft are permit aircraft, so the inspectors are a mixture of ex-aerospace professionals, amateur builders, people who know what they’re doing and – it seems – people who don’t.

I agree that using non-standard locking wire is probably not high on the list of aerospace sins – though again why does it come in several sizes if the demands on it are miniscule? The bigger concern is, it seems to me, that someone who uses locking wire in that way might just possibly not have torqued the bolts correctly or might have wrecked something else through incompetence.

It is reassuring that the aircraft has been extensively disassembled. The main issues that I would have been upset about would have been the airframe and engine. If the airframe and particularly the main spar were to have been damaged then I’d have had to sell it on as a project – I simply don’t have the time or workspace to fix any issues with these. As it is, it’s slightly galling that distance and my current very limited workshop mean that I’m having to pay people to fix things I’m perfectly capable of doing myself.

I had specifically told the inspector that my main concern was the main spar, as these are prone to be damaged in landing accidents and despite having looked into how you check the condition of a wooden spar, I wouldn’t have been confident doing it myself. I was specifically reassured that they were fine. I was livid and very worried when I found that the undercarriage has somehow been bent to the extent that you couldn’t push the aircraft by hand on a paved surface. New inspector – whom I trust rather more – reckons that the spar is fine and is quite happy to fly the permit flight.

It seems that the problem with the undercarriage – not to mention the unconventional wire-wrapping – was longstanding and the aircraft has passed its annual inspection on several occasions despite these problems. It’s certainly shaken my confidence in the LAA inspection system.

Are there really £3000 of hoses on a TB20?

Technically all the hoses including pitot-static were due for replacement as time-expired. The pitot-static would of course be expensive to replace in terms of labour costs rather than the raw materials.

The price is however 1/3 of the Socata price, so if you plan ahead….. as always, the less you know the more you pay. It’s all in my writeup.

For which many thanks – armed with that knowledge we ordered them early and had them fitted at the next annual :)

The pitot-static would of course be expensive to replace in terms of labour costs rather than the raw materials.

Well, yes, the materials would certainly not cost much at all, given that one job a certain well known firm did for me used these plastic hoses for the pitot-static stuff

Actually I don’t think the labour cost all that much either…

If you do the pitot-static properly you will not use this rubbish which is good for feeding air into an aquarium… you will use a proper hose and proper fittings, not cable ties. But that takes longer and costs money

Yes, LAA aircraft are permit aircraft, so the inspectors are a mixture of ex-aerospace professionals, amateur builders, people who know what they’re doing and – it seems – people who don’t.

I agree that using non-standard locking wire is probably not high on the list of aerospace sins – though again why does it come in several sizes if the demands on it are miniscule?

Maybe I’m wrong, who knows, but this looks like more of a crash of “cultures”. It seems to me the aircraft is in good condition, but with some odd pieces of hardware here and there. This is easy to fix, a couple of days work, maybe some more to replace/fix worn hinges etc, but this is no big deal. If you are afraid of bolts being over torqued, just replace them.

Cotter pins cost nothing, a package like this, and you have “aircraft quality” cad plated cotter pins for the rest of your life.

Safety wire is just a means of preventing nuts and bolts from falling off. Safety wire will not secure torque or anything like that. If the bolt is in place, things are OK. The bolts on the propeller are obviously there, so no damage done. The wiring doesn’t look good, it’s not how it should be done, but it has done the job just like a properly applied safety wire would do. Have you checked if the safety wire is needed at all there?

The bigger concern is, it seems to me, that someone who uses locking wire in that way might just possibly not have torqued the bolts correctly or might have wrecked something else through incompetence.

Maybe, maybe not. In my opinion this is more in the category of lining up the shoos in a perfectly straight line, or sorting the books alphabetically/chronologically by author and title and year (and keeping it that way). It has little to do with airworthiness.

The big thing in GA (and all of life, really) is that if somebody is sloppy in one area they are prob99 sloppy in other areas.

So if a pilot has an expired medical, that obviously doesn’t matter (so long as he doesn’t actually drop dead while flying, etc) but it means he probably hasn’t changed the oil for 200 hours (which does matter) and probably also means he is forging the logbook entries (which doesn’t matter until he sells the plane and then the buyer gets shafted), etc. etc.

People generally don’t change…

I’ve been informally involved in a number of prebuys and the % of them in which the seller has been definitely dishonest is pretty staggering. Way more than 50%. But you could say the same about cars and houses!

The % in which the maintenance company has been negligent (in the sense of missing out tasks which will in due course result in huge expenditure on worn out engine or airframe parts) is probably about 90%. But that doesn’t mean you can’t buy 90% of planes for sale. It just means you need to be aware of what you are in for and budget for it.

I’ve been informally involved in a number of prebuys and the % of them in which the seller has been definitely dishonest is pretty staggering. Way more than 50%

I have been formally involved in a good number of pre-buys, and my experience is the majority of owners are honest and do their best to represent their planes truefully.

That said, I do very intensive phone screening/interrogations before budging even 1 inch towards a PPI. I gently put the phone down when my BS meter starts into the red zone, so that keeps the wasted time to a minimum.