Logbook Deception
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...
AOPA Pilot Magazine
Savvy Savings
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...
Training Savvy Mechanics
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...
9,000 Exhaust Valves
Since we launched our borescope initiative in January 2024, more than 150,000 borescope images have been uploaded to Savvy’s repository, and about 100,000 of them have been reviewed by our analytical team. We’ve been particularly interested in exhaust valve images,...
Quantifying Maintenance Risk
In the early 1940s as World War II was raging, the distinguished British biologist ConradHal (C.H.) Waddington Ph.D. had his academic career temporarily interrupted when he became involved in operations research for the Royal Air Force Coastal Command. The...
Changing the Oil
I got my first car when I was 17 years old. It was a green 1947 Plymouth sedan, a hand-me-down from my parents that they used as an excuse to buy a brand new 1961 Chrysler.I remember back then that...
Borescope Meets AI
In my column in the June 2025 issue of AOPA Pilot (“Borescope Initiative”), I reported on the initiative we launched on January 1, 2024 to promote and improve the use of borescopes as the gold standard for assessing cylinder...
Project GADfly Update
I last wrote about Project GADfly in the November 2022 issue of AOPA Pilot (“When Data Doesn’t Look Right”). This was a first peek at an R&D effort here at Savvy Aviation to harness artificial intelligence to analyze the...
The Borescope Initiative—One Year Later
For 20 years I’ve been preaching about the benefits of using borescope inspections as the gold standard for assessing cylinder condition. Yet we still see far too much dependence on the traditional (and unreliable) differential compression test. Mechanics are removing...
Ready, Fire, Aim!
Picture this: For several months, you’ve been suffering from debilitating pain that seems to run from your lower back and radiate into your right upper leg. You report this to your primary care physician, who refers you to an orthopedic...
Security Violation
My 80th Christmas was a memorable one. I had been feeling guilty about all the time my poor airplane had been sitting unloved in the hangar during the last months of 2024, and I decided that Christmas week would be...
Worth the squeeze?
Like many of you, I’m an aircraft owner. I have been one for a long time. I bought my first airplane—a Cessna 182—in 1968 when I was 24 years old. Four years later at age 28, I traded up to...
Data-Driven Diagnosis
Why don’t more A&Ps use engine monitor data for troubleshooting? The owner of a 2005 Cessna T182 was on vacation in Key West Florida. He decided to go up for a local sightseeing flight, but when he started the Lycoming TIO-540...
Supervised Maintenance
Who is allowed to perform maintenance on a certificated aircraft? The FAA rule that answers that question is 14 CFR 43.3—Persons authorized to perform maintenance, preventive maintenance, rebuilding, and alterations. This rule authorizes repair stations, A&P mechanics, repairmen working for...
Concierge Maintenance
Rethinking the business model for maintenance of GA aircraft. For more than a decade, my primary care physician was Dr. F. She was a wonderful doctor with a deep understanding of internal medicine and superb people skills who cared deeply...
Distrust and Verify
The Perils of Trying to Fix a Problem You Haven’t Seen For Yourself The phrase “trust but verify” was made famous by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in December 1987 after the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with...
Engine Temps Gone Wild
When his Skylane’s engine monitor readings went crazy-high, Frank called Savvy’s 24/7 breakdown assistance hotline for help. “I just flew my Cessna 182 from Kansas City to St. Louis to drop off a passenger there,” Frank Annecchini told the Savvy...
Why Annual Inspections?
The big boys don’t do them—why must we? Given today’s acute shortage of GA mechanics and the difficulty owners are having getting their airplanes on shop schedules, I’ve been receiving an increasing number of inquiries about the need for annual...
Unaffordable/Unavailable
Recently, a client with an older Cessna 182 Skylane reported that his nose landing gear strut was leaking fluid and repeatedly going flat. Inspection revealed that the original chrome strut piston had become badly pitted and was tearing up the...
The Tale of Two Prebuys
My company manages a lot of prebuys. At any given point in time, we typically have a dozen of them in progress. We’ve managed thousands of them over the years, and seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Most...
Minimally Invasive
What we can learn from medicine about fixing things without taking them apart. A longtime friend who was suffering from extreme fatigue and shortness of breath. She was diagnosed with congestive heart failure caused by aortic valve stenosis, and she...
Savvy’s Borescope Initiative
Teaching owners (and mechanics) how to do borescope inspections right In my last column (“Ending the War on Jugs,” AOPA Pilot March 2024 issue), I talked at length about why we should use the borescope—not the compression tester—as the gold...
Ending the War on Jugs
Weak compression doesn’t always mean that the cylinder has to come off. For most of my nearly six decades as an aircraft owner and three decades as an A&P, the rule about cylinders was simple: If the compression reading was...
Unleaded Avgas—Cure or Curse?
Does unleaded fuel really cause exhaust valve seat recession? The October 27 announcement by the University of North Dakota (UND) flight school that it was terminating its year-long test of Swift UL94 unleaded avgas and returning to 100LL came as...