Page 34 - TNT Jan 17

that may be found in the process of the inspection. Those extra charges would be for maintenance or repair.
Making the Distinction
There’s a tendency for many airplane owners and even some mechanics to use the terms maintenance, inspection and repair interchangeably. The three words have three distinct meanings. If we make the proper distinction it may answer a lot of questions many owners have about keeping their airplane safe, airworthy and reliable at the lowest possible cost.
Maintenance
Maintenance includes all those things that need to be done to keep it in conformity, by inhibiting wear and staving off the effects of use and fatigue. The root word of maintenance is “maintain.” That is what maintenance is all about: a continual process to maintain compliance with the certification standard, to keep it airworthy before anything wears or breaks. It is a common
If you defer maintenance to the annual, you’re far more likely to find the airplane broken when you want to make a flight, or to find yourself (and your family or customers) stranded far from home when a failure prevented a return trip. Think of it like this: maintenance is what you do so you don’t have to make a repair.
Many Airplane Flight Manuals (AFMs) and Pilot’s Operating Handbooks (POHs) add the adjective preventive to the word maintenance. In reality that’s redundant—by definition all maintenance is preventive. If this semantic redundancy makes it easier to visualize the concept of continually keeping the airplane airworthy, however, all the better.
Inspection
An inspection determines that the airplane is in conformity with its Type Certificate and any STCs. On a routine basis pilots inspect the airplane for airworthiness before every flight. Many pilots conduct a short post-flight inspection also, to detect any changes in airworthiness standards that occurred during the flight.
An annual or 100-hour inspection follows an extensive checklist of items to visually and operationally check. The inspection, however, is just that: a very close look at the airplane to ensure it meets certification standards. That’s all...a close look.
Repair
A repair is required when an item no longer meets its certification standard, or is worn or fatigued to the point that it is near the limits of airworthiness. Except as allowed by regulations concerning flight with inoperative equipment, a repair is something that cannot wait for the next inspection. In most cases it will need to be done before the next flight.
If an aircraft owner has an “annual nightmare,” it was really almost always a lack of ongoing maintenance that made it a repair nightmare. The need for repair was only discovered (or acted upon) during the inspection, when signing the airplane off as in compliance with its Type Certificate and STCs forced the owner stop putting it off.
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aircraft owner fallacy that maintenance items are something that are done during the annual inspection. Sure, there are some maintenance functions that are routinely re-done during an annual inspection, for example, engine oil and filter change. In most cases, however, if you wait a year to grease the landing gear, replace chafing wires, address a minor valve issue or some other maintenance task, it will become much costlier to fix by the time the next annual comes around.
32 • TWIN & TURBINE
January 2017