This is terribly sad, not only for your friend, but for the world at large. Is there a future for humanity?
AdamFrisch wrote:
So be careful around Fairoaks
Not only around Fairoaks. In Germany we had several cases where even engines (mostly Rotax) have been stolen. To avoid this our hangar has got an alarm system and video surveillance.
Very sad! I hope that insurance will cover this but it must be very hard to tell exactly how much damage has been made.
Horrible.
The thing I would like to know is how exactly the new “owner” proposes to sell this stuff. With uncertified-market stuff there is an easy market if you have the “right contacts” because owners can self install and there is no mandatory dealer interaction (hence the numerous Rotax engine thefts) but you can’t do that with a G600. You could self install the box, since the IM has escaped into the wild some time ago, and probably 100% legally using the AML STC (which legally cannot be restricted to dealers, especially not in the EU) and get an IA to sign off the 337 (which doesn’t have to show the serial numbers). But you still need some dealer support to set the G600 up. This is done with a special SD card which only dealers can get, which then presents an opportunity for someone to check the serial number.
GTN boxes, I don’t know.
An American ex-pat that flew his Aero Commander over and now based in Fairoaks EGTF had his panel TRASHED over the week-end of May 1st.
Here’s the damage :
Just saw that Patrick posted on another thread.
That said, I am appalled at the number of theft reports coming out of the UK .
Gives a whole ’nother meaning to the expression “Rip-off Britain” …
Posts moved to an existing thread.
Can anyone think of an answer to post #5 above?
Garmin has a very extensive database and they DO track ALL of their aviation products, and that includes any on-line database up-dates.
My guess is that these idiots don’t know about this going in and quickly find out when they start fencing the stuff .
The thieves were clearly not very familiar with the installations for what they were taking, given how much damage they did and how little they actually took. I would bet that their best return on effort was all my new Bose headsets, the stealing of which didn’t require breaking anything… wish they’d stopped at the headsets.
In terms of my G600 and most of my missing or broken avionics, they took the shiny stuff they could get – the pilot side display, but left the actual brains behind the systems, so effectively all they got were a couple of computer monitors. The exception being the GTNs, where they got most of the kit, both boxes – and maybe they sold them on eBay or similar, someone on Beechtalk mentioned having a friend in the US who was trying to set up escrow to purchase what were a too good to pass up price on a GTN out of Europe. I looked for them on eBay and couldn’t find any listings. So maybe the thieves got something for GTNs but my understanding is that the serial numbers are now on the stolen list and would not be installable at a reputable shop and the nav databases will be unable to be updated, so those boxes won’t be very useful to the buyer and will, in fact, prove to have been “too good to be true.”
Pure, possibly inappropriate, speculation but someone mentioned to me that the theft from my plane over the May 1, three day weekend, coincided with the Chobham Carnival nearby to the airfield, so it may be a Carnival folks or Travellers… as their had been a rash of burglaries during previous carnivals. I wonder if there was a carnival on nearby to the incident of recent engine thefts.
In my personal experience, there is a lot of generally non-violent property related crime in the U.K. Lots of burglaries, car thefts, bag stealing… I’ve lived in New York City, Los Angeles, London, Chicago and the South of France for most of my adult life and have travelled quite extensively for work and pleasure, so I do have a bit of perspective on this. In places like NYC, Chicago, L.A., in rougher neighborhoods, things can be pretty dicey, but it seems fairly obvious when things are unsafe… in and around London, my experience has been of being slightly lulled into a sense of security due to pleasant, safe seeming conditions, only to then be subjected to serious crime. We’ve had our home burglarized multiple times, my car was regularly broken into, my wife was assaulted on the street by some attempting to steal her watch, my wife’s purse has been stolen during our dining in a restaurant two times… we have friends whose BMW X-5 was stolen, while parked in front of their house, three times in a year, each time replaced by their insurance company (the third time the car was discovered, after being replaced, with a different, less interesting to thieves, brand of of vehicle, on a ship leaving the port of Southampton for Africa or somewhere… it turned out there was a car theft ring operating out of the South Kensington Sainsbury’s parking lot car wash, cloning the keys and then stealing the cars at night).
