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Magneto Overhaul / IRAN (inspect & repair as necessary) and USA or Europe?

I contacted QAA in Oklahoma (a company I use for most accessory overhauls) regarding their comment on the above posts. Here is a reply from the company owner, authorised to post in its entirety

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I will only add that once you have to use a courier e.g. DHL (either because > 2kg precludes airmail, or because a company won’t / can’t use airmail) the cost of sending an item to say Holland, from the UK, is not much different to sending it to the USA.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

the cost of sending an item to say Holland, from the UK, is not much different to sending it to the USA.

I send dozens of parts to/from both the USA and throughout Europe, every month.

Whilst the difference of the cost for the basic shipping of a small box (think magneto) US Vs EU may be relatively close, the big difference is getting through and paying customs & taxes when coming from the US.

Nothing more frustrating than paying Over-night Service and then have the parts blocked in Customs for a week …

That said, I have been making HUGE savings on all my shipping by using a “Comparator” service like this one : https://www.upela.com/en/ although I use a different one that’s based in France.

This has cut my shipping expenses to LESS THAN half for both US & EU.

FAA A&P/IA
LFPN

No Customs (import duty) on aircraft parts…

You have to make sure the vendor marks the documents (not the package; nobody looks at the actual package because for US-Europe air shipments the customs clearance in Europe is done while the goods are still in the USA) prominently with AIRCRAFT PARTS.

Interesting site… I have asked my office to check it against what we pay. There is a huge variation e.g. DHL Fedex UPS etc drop 50% off their list price for a regular user and another 50% off for a really big user. We know this because at work we ship stuff on others’ accounts and can see what they get charged.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

You have to make sure the vendor marks the documents (not the package; nobody looks at the actual package because for US-Europe air shipments the customs clearance in Europe is done while the goods are still in the USA) prominently with AIRCRAFT PARTS.

Didn’t help us here last month… yes, there is no import duty (VAT though) but customs still had the package in their grips for almost 2 weeks until they decided that there is no duty so we’d only have to pay the customs inspection charge of CHF30.- which you are likely to pay on e.g. most stuff imported from anywhere. I’ve not had a single item which actually had import duty on it in recent years but 2/3rds of them got the inspection charge…

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

One other difference is that a reputable US company like QAA will be processing perhaps 10x to 100x more parts than a European company. The GA scene there is simply so much bigger.

When the D3000 magneto maker (Bendix) dropped the business, there was a scarcity of key parts for a year or so, until some PMA equivalents emerged. Even now AIUI the main housing is not PMAd so if that has a crack you have a problem. There was nothing at all at the known aviation suppliers in Europe (except some “fake new” parts with a fake 8130-3 from a now-defunct UK outfit… ask me how I know) but I found a complete overhauled mag at QAA, which I immediately bought.

It is true that Customs people are largely muppets; their last job was packing McD burgers. I had an engine stuck for 4 weeks in 2008, and got wrongly charged import duty on all kinds of aircraft parts, which then had to be contested and re-assessed. This is why air freight and airmail/air parcel are dodgy (because nobody gives a to$$ about you the customer) but the couriers, especially DHL, are well organised to deal with this and will do all they can to push the package through…. at a price of course. But a lot of the trouble comes from the vendor not stating AIRCRAFT PARTS clearly enough.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
You would not pay import duty on aviation parts – but you´d pay VAT on anything you import except small amounts below say € 20.- . Vic
vic
EDME

Nothing avoids VAT

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Currently awaiting a new mixture control that the supplier kindly shipped UPS at a cost of $122 without asking me. How can a 3 lb pacakge on a 6 day service cost that much?!?!

EIMH, Ireland

Storage.

Biggin Hill

I seem to have got special value from QAA in past years, paying about $800 for a mag which was quite obviously stripped, NDTd and repainted, so that’s an overhaul. But a more recent overhaul for which I have kept the invoice was $1495. A former resident here likes to send me emails (which he knows I won’t publish because it would be indecent – oh the joys of being a pilot forum mod) saying how much cheaper Europe is but if it was as cheap as he says (€800 for an overhaul) the whole of the USA would be sending their mags to Belgium. So, as usual, this clearly isn’t the whole picture, although I don’t know where the differences lie.

As regards the above $122, that is a fairly usual “no discount” courier (DHL, UPS, etc) cost between any two countries in Europe for a small package. There is only one service in Europe generally, “express”. The crippling of the various European post offices (privatisation, or getting them prepared for privatisation) has handed all this business to the couriers who now have a license to print money. This is why it is so irritating that so many companies won’t use airmail, that airmail is limited to 2kg, that airmail takes 4-10 days, and fairly often gets lost (stolen mostly, I think). However, the courier delivery is nearly always the following working day (the USA, to/from Europe, takes 1-2 days longer than that). Europe doesn’t have the equivalent of the US “UPS Ground” service which is great and very cheap because, ahem, Europe is not one country.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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