As one of the elders of the regional RV community, I occasionally get evening phone calls from RV Builders who have a problem or, because I’m an EAA Tech Counselor, want some advice or assistance.
One the other night left me shaking my head.
An RV acquaintance has been building his RV-12iS at a chapter hangar and it’s ready for a Designated Airworthiness Inspector (DAR) to come have a look and, hopefully, leave behind an airworthiness certificate.
Time is of the essence because his lease at the hangar is up and the next in line is ready to occupy his spot. Eventually the plane will find a home at Crystal Airport but for now, it’s a fair distance from there.
My acquaintance reported that the DAR he had engaged to do the job called him to tell him he can’t do it, at least not right now. It seems he failed to keep up with the required recurrent training and the FAA has shut him down.
The FAA has some pretty rigorous requirements for DAR-T’s. They have their initial training, but then every 36 months they are required to take additional training in aircraft certification, form 8130-3 (that’s the application for an airworthiness certificate), amateur and light-sport inspections, inspecting aging airplanes, and field approval delegation.
All of that makes sense, particularly when you consider how things are changing right now with MOSAIC 2.
It wouldn’t have been hard for my acquaintance’s DAR to do any of this; most of the training is online and web based, and you have three years to do it.
But the DAR didn’t and now there’s a plane – well, it’s not a plane yet, I guess – marooned in a far-away hangar.
The owner asked about my decision to bring Tony Kirk from Toledo/Detroit to do the inspection on my aircraft earlier this year. As I’ve written, Tony is an experienced builder and actually designed some components of the RV-12iS when he was a technical specialist with Van’s Aircraft.
Getting Tony out to Minnesota wasn’t cheap, of course. I paid for his round-trip, same-day ticket (about $900) as well as his regular fee ($600). But I wanted the best of the best, and, besides, if you build a $100,000 airplane, is there where you’re going to cut corners?
I told my friend that given it’s summer, he’d probably fly his RV-12iS out (yes, the same RV-12iS that won a Gold Lindy at Oshkosh last month) and stay overnight. That might be cheaper than Delta.
I don’t know what route my friend is going to go but I’ve seen his project and it’s a well-built airplane, so I know he has a thing for quality.
How well do you know the person inspecting your airplane? That’s the question that I think any homebuilder should be asking, particularly as the FAA is making it easier for people to hang out a shingle.
If a person can’t even keep up to date on required training, what kind of inspection are you going to get.
There’s another question, though, that homebuilders should ask: What do I want out of this inspection?
The quick answer might be “an airworthiness certificate” and that’s obviously the end game. But the correct answer is, “I want the best, most experienced set of eyes to look at my work and confirm my assertion that it is safe for flight.”
Some years ago, an online acquaintance – Dan Lloyd – crashed and was killed in his RV-10, hours before he was going to put his family in it for a flight to Maine.
He had just completed the plane got his airworthiness certificate and, allegedly, completed the then-40-hour requirement for Phase I testing.
The NTSB found a number of problems including the fact that on his first flight, clecoes held the cowling together. The weight and balance paperwork had different centers of gravity, the EFIS was inoperative, the ADAHRS unit (which provides pitot/static/AOA information) has not been calibrated.
There was other evidence of some very poor building. A trim tab for the rudder was discovered to be attached with duct tape. The lock nuts which were used on the rod ends for the pitch control system could be spun by hand and were not tightened against the rod ends and were found on the threaded portion of the rods approximately 1/4 inch away from what would be their normal seated positions. The right trim tab rod on the elevator was connected to its rod end by two threads and was shorter than the trim tab rod for the left trim tab. It displayed evidence that the end of the trim tab rod at one time had broken off, and then had been re-inserted into the rod end, as the rest of the threaded portion was not present.
And that’s all just a small amount of the problem with his airplane, but it’s enough for us to ask this question: How on earth did a DAR issue an airworthiness certificate?
This was 2007 and in the intervening time, it’s gotten even easier to be lax.
Many of us took the light sport repairman inspection course down at Chapter 25’s hangar in June and now we’re lining up for appointments at MSP FSDO to make the actual application. This will allow us to do the condition inspections (experimentals don’t have “annuals”) on aircraft we own.
If we invested a little more money and two-to-three weeks in Missouri, we could take the next step and take the Light Sport Repairman Maintenance Course. That allows us not only to perform condition inspections/maintenance on aircraft we own. We could do the same thing on aircraft we don’t.
Is two to three weeks really enough to make us capable?
Sometimes. Maybe most of the time. But not always.
I found this out the hard way when I hired an LSRM to investigate the cause of my Rotax 912iS problems last winter. He misdiagnosed the Engine Control Unit Data (I was doublechecking his diagnosis with some experienced acquaintances on Rotax engines in California) and while doing an inspection of the lifters following the Rotax oil purge procedure, he broke a bolt on the cylinder covers because “it didn’t feel like it was tight enough.” He didn’t use a torque wrench.
That LSRM will never set foot in my hangar again.
With our increasing freedoms for experimental aircraft, there is increasing ability to cut corners and, thus, an increasing chance you’ll end up a cautionary tale.
The period when your aircraft is ready to fly (or so you think) but not yet legal to fly, is the most dangerous time in aircraft building. Like any emergency, it’s important to step back, wind your watch, breathe deeply, and evaluate potential decisions such as “who’s going to inspect my airplane.”
