Yes I just saw that Textron have moved the maintenance and overhaul manuals to ATP.com. Not the SB and SD, but the manuals….. didn’t know that.
ATP – AFAIK basically a publisher of maintenance etc manuals – seems to be the traditional way for aircraft manufacturers to make money out of documentation which should be provided for free.
Socata went through this phase, eventually dumping ATP.
The material ATP published were barely readable scans of paper pages, and they were charging $1000/year per CD. Yes, CDs delivered by mail. A new one per month – even if identical to the last one, which for most GA (i.e. discontinued before WW1) products would be the case. And the recipient was required to destroy all previous CDs… some ended up on Ebay but ATP’s lawyers were hot on the case, though not before I and others managed to obtain the very last editions of TB manuals 
Gradually Socata decided this greed was giving them a bad name and made the manuals available in properly readable (PDF) versions. The funny thing was that they never supplied ATP with a lot of stuff e.g. the GT (post year 2000 or so) material. Originally they were restricted to members of the US owner group but I got them all anyway, via various dealer channels.
The guy who runs the user group – an expat Brit – even wrote the server software such that if you downloaded a PDF it would be watermarked with your name, so you could not pass it on. Luckily, there are websites which unlock locked PDFs and it was easy to remove the watermarking by redacting the unlocked document.
It is bad news that somebody is still restricting manuals to the ATP $$$ channel.
Especially as a fairly widely held interpretation of the regs, especially in anally retarded Europe, is that nobody is permitted to do any work on an aircraft unless they possess the latest data. previous thread. This is taken by some as meaning that even if the MM has not changed since 1918 you must have the 2020 version i.e. the 2020 ATP CD (yes, with the 1918 content) to legally work, and this includes pilot maintenance! Thankfully most of the industry ignores this bollox. The GA maintenance business would collapse if every maint outfit had to have the ATP $1k/year sub for every plane they touch. Funnily enough, when I used a company to work on my plane, I always gave them a copy of that 2005 CD
No wonder this stuff is restricted. Everybody and their dog has fingers stuck deep in the pie.
EuroFlyer wrote:
Yes I just saw that Textron have moved the maintenance and overhaul manuals to ATP.com. Not the SB and SD, but the manuals….. didn’t know that.
There you go, I did not know that either. I have a full manual and parts catalogue purchased a number of years ago and recently was asked to supply ‘’the newest’’ version of it so that this company could work on my plane.
Hello. I got it alrealdy from beech forum. Thanks to all for help.
And yes. It’s stupid and poor that this kind of publication is restricted and soo expensive…
