Proposed AD for PA-28 wing spars

Aveling wrote:

It seems very strange that a relatively new aircraft (OK, high time) could suffer so much fatigue when huge numbers of old clunkers like mine (approaching 7000 Hrs over 30 years) still hold together.

Somebody in piperforum.com claims that the accident plane had 63,000 take off and landings in less than 8000 hours, which is “slightly” more than typical private plane..

On the basis: “Better to be safe, then sorry“, although the AD is technically ‘only advisory’ at the moment, I am still having it done at the Annual on my Arrow in three weeks time . . . just in case.

Yes I saw that on the Piper Forum too but no idea where they got the info on the 63,000 landings and takes offs. That seems huge at 7.87 landings per hour for it’s whole life. It doesn’t seem credible to me. Also reports of a hard landing shortly before (from memory the day before) which was inspected and cleared by the engineers. I’d like to know where this information came from as I could not trace it back to any NTSB or similar report.

My 350 ish landings in 4 years doesn’t seem too bad by comparison.

7.87 seems high,but not impossible- from my logs I see that I have logged 10 circuits for 1hour flying when practicing TG-s. And we used to log +10 min for pilots log(taxi etc) , so that indicates 5min for aerodrome circuit. If I think how that school plane was used, 70% of time on circuit seems probable..

Where do you log the number of landings in aircraft logbook? or tech logs?

Or is it owner logbook?

For gliders, some log winch hooks as some need to change each 10000cycles, I use 3 winches a day as proxy, so I still have 30 years to go !

aircraft logbook

I have to say that this calculation is very sensible , if you look at the AD’s that Robin have for landing gear inspection you can see this is based on Glider towing operation from grass airfields, If you own a touring aircraft and use it to commute from the UK to the north of Spain using only hard runways the landing gear maintenance requirements are vastly excessive.

At least the Piper calculation is an effort to address how the aircraft is flown.

@ivark: Just a little remark, it is not wise to post personal data, especially including hand written signatures, open on the internet.

@ivark First I thought your logbook was Swedish until i paid closer attention to the airports. Danish sounds like a mess but written is actually very similar to Swedish.

On aircraft logbooks I have seen there is no way to get the number of landings but one can use the number of A to A flights to same airfield less than two hours *4/h, the rest of flights *1

Probably, as A_and_C highlights adjust the total by *2 for grass and *1 for tarmac