Personal aviation is facing an existential crisis. I don’t use that phrase lightly. After decades spent managing maintenance, troubleshooting squawks, advising owners, analyzing failure data, and working with hundreds of maintenance shops and thousands of...
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...
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...
