Aging Aircraft, Unleaded Fuel, Certification Gridlock, and What Owners Should Do Now General aviation doesn’t face just one challenge. It faces several: aging materials, fuel transition uncertainty, certification gridlock, and mounting pressure on the piston parts...
Here’s a story that should sound familiar. The names have been changed to protect the complicit. The time has come for Bill to put his Bonanza in the shop for its annual ordeal. Manny, one of the A&P mechanics, and Tom, his trainee who is building the hours to...
During maintenance on his Piper Aerostar 602P, an aircraft owner—who we’ll call Paul—was told that eight windows showed signs of crazing and would need to be replaced immediately, at a cost exceeding $30,000. Unsure whether such an expensive repair was truly...
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my company’s managing tens of thousands of annual inspections for thousands of airplanes over the past two decades, it’s this: Doing maintenance in a thoughtful, data-driven, reliability-centered fashion results in a safer, more...
Shakespeare loved a good pun. Even he might groan at this one. I wanted to write about magnetos and I recently saw “Hamnet” and you know the rest. Usually the format of the Puzzler is I present a scenario and we work through the decision tree to figure out...
General aviation doesn’t change in sudden revolutions. It evolves quietly: through material choices, certification decisions, engineering tradeoffs, and lessons learned the hard way over decades. In this episode of Aviation Masters, host Mike Busch sits down with...
When a prospective aircraft purchaser arranges for a prebuy examination, the objective is two-fold: to uncover any big-ticket issues with the aircraft, and to ensure that the cost of correcting them is properly allocated between the buyer and the seller. In this case,...
Can you tell I made a New Year’s resolution to kick my vocabulary up a notch? Perspicacious is a hard word to work into conversation but it pretty accurately describes a Puzzler reader. I like this definition — showing an ability to notice and understand...
A&P’s are born with an itch to take things apart. That’s what drew us to aircraft maintenance in the first place. Airplanes are very cool and complicated machines, and it’s hard to resist the temptation to disassemble and dissect them to learn how they work....
If you have ever been told, “That’s just how piston engines work,” this episode of Aviation Masters might make you raise an eyebrow and then start asking more questions. In this episode, host Mike Busch sits down with George Braly, one of the most influential (and...
