Maintenance - Unscheduled Maintenance
How To Lower The Odds Of Unschedule Maintenance Events
Over the years we've maintained a number of aircraft fleets, and we've learned a lot from the process. We've found that if you follow these few simple rules, over time, your aircraft will become more reliable and your maintenance costs will go down.
1.) Have Us do Regular Maintenance on Your Aircraft
That means a Valley Aero oil change at least 3 times a year, no matter how many hours you fly. That gives us a chance to look the airplane over and spot and fix small snags before they become big snags at really inappropriate times.
2.) Fix Snags as Soon as You Can
If you can't afford the downtime to fix those small snags when they're discovered, at least have them fixed as early as you can. Don't wait until they become bigger snags that end up taking out other parts or other systems as well.
3.) Be Aware of Any Changes in Your Airplane
If you notice something unusual with your airplane, a different vibration, static on the radio, a change in power or flight charactersitics, guages reading slightly different than usual, bring your airplane to us immediately. Our years of experience allow us to very quickly evaluate most problems and we're trained to spot them at the incipient stage. We guarantee that catching them early will always save you money.
4.) Give Your AME Enough Time
When we have your airplane in for an annual or 100 hour, give us enough time to do the job right. A rushed annual or 100 hour usually means we have to defer items and we don't like doing that because they almost always cost more to repair later on.
When Things Do Break
There’s nothing more disheartening to an aircraft owner than an unexpected failure or defect, especially when it forces you to ground your airplane.
To make matters worse, when defects occur, they usually occur at the worst possible time, like when you’re loading up the family for that long anticipated flight to Tofino, or about to head out for a night flight with dinner at Victoria. The very nature of airplanes makes it almost impossible to expect 100% reliability from them. And, given the age of most of the GA fleet, we're frankly surprised they don't break down more often than they do. So, when the unexpected happens, it's a good idea to have a fair idea of what to expect in repair scheduling.
How We Prioritize Our Booking Sheet
Here’s how we manage our booking sheet: commercial operators, because they earn their daily bread by keeping airplanes in the sky, almost always get priority over private owners. Next on the priority list comes our regular private customers followed by customers whose aircraft we haven’t serviced or previously inspected. If you’re from out of town and experience a problem, even though you're not a regular customer, one way or another we’ll do our best to help you out so you can get back home as quickly as possible.
When we’re busy, especially through the summer months, we know how frustrating it can be for you to have to wait for service. From April to October our crew works a lot of overtime, but in the interest of safety, we have to put a limit the number of hours they work each week.
And, when an airplane, in for annual or 100 hour, goes over schedule because we’ve found a huge problem, we can’t just push it out the door to keep everyone else on schedule. If we did that, before long, we'd end up with a parking lot full of broken airplanes that never got repaired.
If your airplane has a problem, we’ll do very our best for you, but there may be times when you’ll have to wait a day or two for service. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of scheduling an aircraft maintenance shop, and every other shop, no matter what they tell you, will follow the same priorities as us. It's the nature of this business.