Peter’s view on the CAA oversight of maintenance companies is interesting but the overall impression that the CAA do nothing is very far from the truth.
The CAA do understand who are the high risk companies and concentrate their efforts on those who they see as high risk but are not helped by the fact that a lot of owners at the bottom end of the market are not interested in quality maintenance and only really want the piece of paper that lets the aircraft fly.
I know of one maintenance company that was being investigated this was because when an aircraft was dropped in my lap by the new owner the CAA became very interested when I raised the first MOR on the aircraft, more MOR’s continued with about 50% of the MOR’s I have raised in forty years in the business being raised on this aircraft.
The maintenance history of the aircraft reflects the bottom end of the business, for a long time the aircraft was maintained by a reputable company and records showed a careful and proportionate approach. When ownership changed the aircraft went to a number of maintenance companies with no one doing a second annual check until it came to rest at the company that CAA was showing an interest in.
This case is symptomatic of the owners who want no more than the piece of paper to fly and the pressure that this puts on some at the bottom end of the business to buckle under to stay afloat.
The CAA did take appropriate action to resolve the problem, it did not go to court but the CAA did ensure that the problem would not re-occur.
The CAA maintenance enforcement is far from toothless and is quick to investigate allegations of wrongdoing but would rather resolve problems without recourse to the courts in all but the most serious and flagrant cases.
In terms of diagnosing required work and performing it to a competent standard there should be no ‘bottom end of the business’ nor any ‘top end of the business’ or any other parts on any sort of scale.
Paying less or more for your maintenance should reflect things like salubriousness of facilities, capacity, lead times, advice given and quality in aesthetic aspects of maintenance such as paint jobs.
A maintenance shop is either doing the required work to the required standard, or it is not. Where we are talking about ‘mistakes’ I can see a case for resolving things with a light touch where possible, but unfortunately as in the automotive world most of it is a case of outright dishonesty – i.e. charging for work and ticking the boxes but not actually doing it. This is widespread and you can blame the customers if you like, but if the licensed organisations actually feared being taken to task for outright dishonesty then they wouldn’t do it.
The challenge is that there is a direct tradeoff between doing whatever the “right action” is, and making a living.
And there are so many angles there… Fundamentally there is almost no case for lifed parts in light GA, for example. Practically the whole plane can be maintained safely “on condition”. But implementing that is less simple; the maint business needs the 25% dealer discount on parts (otherwise they would need to charge far more for labour; this is why avionics installers hate free issue parts) but that skews the incentive the wrong way. And the CAA needs the licensing revenue so they have no interest in the maint company going bust.
Many owners insist on minimal cost maintenance, and probably most of them, IME, are PPL schools. The worst maint I ever saw was stuff flown by a CAA charter AOC holder 
The CAA doesn’t like to prosecute because if they lose then a precedent will be set, which creates problems for them for ever after.
So there will be good reasons why this PA46 was not raised, even if somebody suspected funny maintenance (a very obvious possibility, given the CO poisoning evidence). What is the CAA going to do? Prosecute, and lose? That’s completely useless, especially as actually prosecuting a CAA approved maintenance company employee is practically impossible: If you buy a car with a fresh MOT and the wheels fall off the next day, nobody can prove the nuts were loose at the time of the MOT; they would need video footage showing that the guy carefully loosened the nuts, and the video would have to have been securely handled the whole way to be valid for evidence, etc… I also think the raising of the wreck might have found something which might have enabled a private legal action to take place, which – if it found “something” – would have put the CAA in an impossible position: they might have their hand forced to go after somebody (and lose that as well 
). You can get an exhaust failure at any time.
So the CAA did the easy low hanging fruit: bust an illegal charter. It was easy, lots of incriminating SMSs floating around, and it’s a good result for the media. Completely worthless for aviation though. We all know you can do illegal charter; Wingly etc can go within £0.000001 of it If this chap had booked Sala on a Wingly flight, with fully legit payment, and with any extra money done separately, the CAA would have been forced to get into the licensing aspects, with the 61.75 = NQ can of worms, etc.
Graham wrote:
Where we are talking about ‘mistakes’ I can see a case for resolving things with a light touch where possible, but unfortunately as in the automotive world most of it is a case of outright dishonesty – i.e. charging for work and ticking the boxes but not actually doing it. This is widespread and you can blame the customers if you like, but if the licensed organisations actually feared being taken to task for outright dishonesty then they wouldn’t do it.
My club ordered the installation of an electric engine heater in connection with a 100 h inspection. The installation was signed off on the worksheet. After the next winter season we discovered that no heater had actually been installed so we had regularly started the engine in temperatures down to -20°C without preheat. The lack of a heater wasn’t readily noticed as the aircraft also had an electric cabin heater and the engine was always very easy to start.
Fortunately (?) the aircraft then had a prop strike and in the shockload inspection it was discovered that all four cylinders and pistons were damaged and had to be replaced…
The non-work was done by a large part 145 shop associated with a large and well-known (in Sweden and Norway, probably less so in Florida where they also have a branch) flight school. I don’t think they were being deliberately dishonest, just sloppy. We became their customers when they bought the shop we used previously and it was clear that they really didn’t want us as this was not the only “interesting” experience we had with them. They were also very expensive so we changed to another shop as soon as we found one.
The q is how much of the damage can you pin on them lying about installing the heater? :) I’d try, just for the sake of it.
Probably quite a lot, since there was a paper trail showing the nonexistent installation. But getting the whole management of a club behind a legal action is a different proposition.
For the PA46 crash, going after the maintenance company would fail unless there is a clearly implicating paper trail, which there probably won’t be, so it would be an action
Than getting the low hanging fruit (Henderson and his illegal charter business) it would have been more useful to aviation safety if they could show how some exhaust / heater failure had probably caused the deaths of 2 people, because this is a far more common scenario than what Henderson was doing.
@Airborne_Again, if I’m correct in who it was, your ‘friends’ at that well known Scandinavian flight school worked on my plane in the period before I bought it, when it wasn’t being flown but was kept in Annual anyway, at least on paper. At one point they had two US facilities. I redid almost everything they’d touched and fixed everything they’d missed
The primer pump they’d rebuilt was not attached to the panel properly (its in a tight corner so you need the right tools and patience), the ammeter was not working but had been diagnosed by them as an intermittent faulty alternator, and so on. The latter issue was the main reason why it was not being flown.
That story and shop aside, you cannot reasonably think that anybody at any shop will resolve the issues on your plane if you just drop it off with maybe only a vague story about the symptoms. It takes effort, sometimes teamwork and always persistence.
A couple of weeks ago an A&P friend bought a Cessna 170 from an insurance company. The plane had believe or not been somehow written off by them as result of legal finagling by the owner, who had bought it from another guy not long before, followed by disappointment and finger pointing all round a circle including previous owners, shops who had worked on it, multiple insurance companies and God knows who else. It’s got various engine issues and some hidden structural damage but is otherwise a nice looking plane. From the point of view of the current owner/mechanic this is all a bit funny. After purchasing it from the insurance company he flew 400 miles with a friend to collect it as is/where is, got it flyable under a ferry permit in a day, will have everything fixed in few weeks and already has two potential buyers lined up. It’s an example of what seems to happen when you rely on a shop to maintain your plane, hands off. I don’t know anybody who does that locally, or at least I can’t think of anybody at this moment, so more often problems are resolved in a less legalistic, uninsured and more hands-on way that involves cooperation between people. And when they aren’t fixed that way initially (as in the case of the C170) they are eventually. In the process of sorting out the plane versus demanding service somebody makes some money… by adding value, hands on.
Airborne_Again wrote:
I don’t think they were being deliberately dishonest, just sloppy.
Really?
You asked for an add-on product to be installed, they didn’t do it but completed the paperwork saying they had and charged you for it?
And you call that a mistake rather than dishonesty?
Peter wrote:
Than getting the low hanging fruit (Henderson and his illegal charter business) it would have been more useful to aviation safety if they could show how some exhaust / heater failure had probably caused the deaths of 2 people, because this is a far more common scenario than what Henderson was doing.
They didn’t even manage to get them for illegal charter. Like the maintenance issues, that would have involved digging into too many things that would have been difficult to prove and carried a high risk of the jury acquitting.
The charge that stuck in the end was the generic catch-all, ‘endangering an aircraft’.
