Slight thread drift alert 
That is plain fun doing maintenance without an aching back.
Same here, my ship is lifted (elec hoist) and hanging off the hangers in the hangar (…). There’s a downside though: gotta keep that belly shining and the leaks at bay
Archer-181 wrote:
I just don’t recognise some of the costs quoted above.
I think the cost depends hugely where you are based. Labour costs are MASSIVELY different per country and reflect the general per capita income both before and after taxes.
Maintenance will calculate their labour cost from the salaries they have to pay including taxes and social security.
Owners will have to consider affordability on the base of net salaries they are paid.
In some countries, the difference of before and after tax salaries can be more than 60% which never reach the worker! Hence, if monthly net salaries in some countries are within 300-400 Euros per month this does not reflect the cost for the company to employ them, which can be up to 3 times as much.
Maintanance also will add the fixed costs they have mostly into the labour cost because their margin on parts are mostly tiny.
Hence, if you have a mechanic whose net salary broken down would be around 20 Euros per hour would actually cost the employer up to 100 Euros per hour. Add fixed costs and profit to it, and you are easily at 130-200 Euros per hour.
I guess quite some savings could result by doing annuals in low wage countries within EASA. However, this would also mean that your local maintenance will not have much interest to help you in case of need and will try to recover the losses when you really need them. Additionally, cost flying the aircraft to those maintenance facilities and back might well compensate most savings.
It’s not straight hourly labour costs that are the biggest thing. I posted the list a while back. It is the way the aircraft was historically “abused” and how it is managed, and the latter is heavily dependent on airfield-political factors, the main one being whether you can find a freelance maintenance guy and in turn whether there are hangars in which he’s allowed to work. Also a large aspect is whether owner assistance is allowed; this affects the management of the “general condition” of the plane which involves mostly “trivial things” which anyone half competent can do.
Peter wrote:
this affects the management of the “general condition” of the plane which involves mostly “trivial things” which anyone half competent can do
I may be wrong, but I think that older planes are a lot easier to be maintained by “anyone half competent”. If I take my 1970 Comanche it’s all easily accessible (way too many screws, though, but that’s another story) and all explained step-by-step and to a high detail level in the maintenance bible. This will be all the same for a 1970 Piper Arrow.
Yes. However, owner-assistance is of great value because a lot of the work is easy.
For example when we do the Annual, I do the whole 50hr check portion – basically firewall forward. While I am doing that, the A&P/IA does the two oil filters. But the point is that, pre-N-reg, I was paying £500+VAT to a company for the bit I do in about 3hrs! And no self-respecting freelance mechanic is going to say to a “technically able” owner “sorry mate you can’t take out and check the spark plugs”, whereas it is completely normally for a company to ban this entirely.
Another example is this: during the said Annual, my son helped for a few days, both helping the mechanic and doing a load of cosmetic stuff like respraying airframe parts. That would have to be paid for, and “cosmetic trivia” costs as much per hour as “non trivia” which is why so many planes are in a crap cosmetic condition (corrosion, etc): nobody wants to pay the hourly rate to fix that stuff.
The result was a 5 man-day Annual, which would cost how much?? Loads, no matter where it was done. But owner assistance reduced it to 1/3. 1/3. Think about that. The parts cost on that Annual was about 400 quid, plus 3 new tyres (£1000 if you don’t use crappy ones) which are rarely changed.
And everything which had to be done got done. That’s almost never the case with a company. Various avionics bits got fixed, too.
Obviously a lot of owners are unwilling to participate, and as with everything else in life, you pay 
And many would be willing but can’t due to the aforementioned airfield-political factors, which are usually rigged to start with hangar control, and all the other restrictive practices (including the non-availability of freelance mechanics) follow perfectly from that
Peter wrote:
Obviously a lot of owners are unwilling to participate, and as with everything else in life, you pay
Not all owners are capable or have skills which help in this situation. And if you get people like that “assisting” it may well end up causing the qualified folks more work.
Clearly, those who can do this are in an advantage.
What I do note is that some of the participants keep stressing the horrible condition of airplanes which cause a lot of cost. I get the impression that the way airplanes are maintained appear to differ massively between countries, which may well also have a massive consequence on how annuals and maintenance in general is conducted.
This may also have to do with local oversight. If “shagged” planes are tolerated by both CAMOs and CAA and accepted by those who put their life at risk with a badly maintained airplane, clearly shortcuts and cost cuts are taken. This is not what I know and how I would think things are going where I fly.
Yes; that’s all true too.
It’s a different discussion though.
Peter wrote:
I do the whole 50hr check portion – basically firewall forward. While I am doing that, the A&P/IA does the two oil filters. But the point is that, pre-N-reg, I was paying £500+VAT to a company for the bit I do in about 3hrs!
My lowly Warrior per the Piper schedule takes a fair bit more than three hours, and also a fair bit is rear of the firewall: tyre condition and pressures, brake pads and system condition, grease to landing gear and pitch servo trim, lubricate flying control hinges (aileron hinge has teflon), survey for corrosion, electrics check, ground runs. With respect to the survey of the airframe I clean the airframe and in particular the belly, which fortunately is quite clean despite flying from a grass strip! The cleaning alone is more than three hours.
I would suggest the firewall forward is probably the thick end of three hours: raise work order as per program, ground run to warm oil, inspect propeller and dress any nicks etc using correct technique, remove top cowling, drain oil (am blessed with a quick drain so thank you Piper/previous owner), remove filter, open, inspect and discard filter, decide whether oil pump metal filter needs checking based on oil filter inspection, decide whether fuel drain filter needs inspecting (requires bottom cowling removal), install new filter to correct torque and safety wire, new oil, spark plug condition, replace cowling, check hoses and wiring, ground run with paper work, check leaks, check exhaust system condition, check new oil level, complete paperwork and log books, release to service.
This is carried out in a maintenance hangar with all the tools, supplies and waste disposal available.
I plan to continue to do owner assist but mainly because it keeps me connected to any issues with the aircraft. The bible of owner assist in my view is Lew Gage’s book The E-series Bonanzas available from the American Bonanza Society. While very type specific for an old timer type, it reveals how little I actually knew about the technical innards of relatively simple aircraft, despite having sat through the usual pilot Airframe and Power Plant exams in their various guises (EASA can’t recall much use except as an anatomy guide, UK old school exams somewhat more useful especially on systems, USA not really the focus of the ATP exam).
What do people view, more or less, as a reasonable number of man hours for a decent quality annual for:
Fixed gear and prop SEP
Fixed gear VP SEP
Retractable VP SEP
20h-30h of inspections? Gear & Prop may need more inspection, clean and lubrication but that is probably +5h max
Of course anything that needs fixing is sorted separately
