ANNUAL SURPRISES By Steve Wightman, Seawind Repairman 3690413
ANNUAL SURPRISES
ANNUAL SURPRISES; Each year per FAR 43 appendix D and N71RJ’s FAA-approved Airframe Condition Inspection Program my Super Seawind gets a comprehensive safety look with a giant magnifying glass and a super bright light. Like looking at a spacecraft leading up to launch, page after page of components and functions are carefully examined. Everything must meet the high standard of “in condition for safe operation.” This means it must be in good working order and unlikely to fail under normal conditions. It also means that each component must meet the manufacturer’s standards for function, anticorrosion, cleanliness, operation, and leakage tolerances.
A good example is fuel filters. Each year the airframe fuel filter is removed, cleaned, and reinstalled or replaced with a new one depending on the condition. With my Seawind flying a few hours between inspections, the fuel filter is usually found in good condition, so I take the option of cleaning it and reinstalling it because like other metal mesh filters, it is cleanable. If that were not so, I would replace it with a new one. As a matter of fact, if I find anyone dirty filter, I replace all three (two are on the engine). This is the only way I know clean fuel will be delivered to the combustion chamber. All good.
On the other hand, some failures cannot be predicted. Electronic components are one of them. During the last full day of the 2022 inspection, the Electronic Flight Instrument System, EFIS, screen turned to a snowstorm. It was totally unintelligible. There was no warning, no popped circuit breaker, nada. Just a few hours before, it had worked flawlessly. It must have known it was an annual inspection and it decided to infarct right then and there! To make matters worse, it was after 5 PM on the Friday before the Labor Day weekend. Support was nonexistent. This means my airplane is grounded until the EFIS is fixed. I called and emailed Grand Rapids Technology the next day. Today, Tuesday, after several calls, I just got a response. GRT is sending a loaner EFIS to me on second-day air while they work to fix mine.
This is an exception to the recently shrinking support for ANNUAL SURPRISES for aircraft inspections in general – and specifically mine. Parts orders that last year took days now take weeks to months. Specialty services for avionics, engine, and propeller in the Boston region can take a year or more to leap from calendars to cures. Where I planned months before and I got a “yes” for services the past two years, this year the answers were mostly “no”. We are understaffed and completely booked.”
Fortunately for me, a fellow EAA member, Ben Samra, who holds an Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) maintenance certification, gave up many days of his precious personal time to travel 170 miles per day roundtrip to Laconia and assist me in performing the annual inspection. Thank you, Ben.
Luckily, I am authorized to do Annual inspections on my airplane myself. Hence, I proceeded – thinking I would be done by now. Not according to Murphy’s Law! Now the good news is that the EFIS failed with my plane in a hangar next to my toolboxes and not in the air! There could not have been a better location for it to fall. Even though there is a backup monitoring system, I should count my lucky stars and conclude that a much thinner wallet is a small price to pay for safety. And that, my friend, is what the Annual Condition Inspection is all about. Making a safe aircraft even safer.