A pre-season readiness check for a privately owned aircraft

Readiness is a calendar problem before it is an engineering one

Most aircraft that miss a trip are airworthy. What stops them is a date: a certificate that lapsed, a crew currency that ran out, an insurance endorsement nobody renewed, a handling account that went dormant. The aeroplane was fine.

So a pre-season check starts with the calendar, not the hangar.

A note on where authority sits. If the aircraft is managed under an operator's certificate, that operator's approved procedures and maintenance programme govern, and they override anything general written here. If it is privately operated, the maintenance programme the aircraft is on still defines its intervals. Either way, the document your maintenance provider holds is the authority, and requirements should be confirmed with them and with the relevant civil aviation authority rather than assumed from a checklist on a website.

Start with what expires

Pull every date attached to the aircraft, the crew and the arrangements around them into one list, and sort it by date rather than by category. The list usually includes:

• Airworthiness and registration documents
• The insurance policy, its territorial limits and any named pilot conditions
• Crew licences, medicals, recurrent training and type currency
• Emergency equipment with service lives, including beacons and life rafts
• Navigation database and chart subscriptions
• Hangar agreement and ground handling contracts
• Anything on a calendar interval in the maintenance programme

Sorting by date rather than by system is the point. Categories hide the problem. A single ordered list shows you the three things landing in the same fortnight.

Then what is counted in hours or cycles

Calendar items are easy to see and easy to forget. Hour and cycle items are the reverse: nobody forgets them, but the projection is usually wrong, because it is made against last year's flying rather than the season ahead.

Take the planned schedule for the season, convert it to an honest hours estimate, and run it against the next inspection threshold. The question you want answered is not "when is the next inspection due" but "does it fall in the middle of the season, and if so where can the aircraft be when it does". Moving a planned inspection to a quiet fortnight is cheap. Discovering it three days before a trip is not.

The airframe and the hangar

• Walk the aircraft with the engineer, not instead of the engineer. Corrosion, bird and rodent damage, tyre condition, brake wear, seal condition and anything that has changed since it was last flown regularly.
• Deferred defects. Every open item should have an owner, a date and a plan. A deferred defect with none of those is not deferred, it is forgotten.
• Parts on order. Know what is on backorder and what it is holding up. Lead times are the constraint that most often turns a small job into a lost month.
• The hangar itself. Access, power, the tug, the tooling, whether the lease runs past the season.

Crew and currency

Currency is the item most likely to be assumed rather than checked, because the crew are the ones who know and the office is the one that plans.

Ask for the dates rather than the reassurance: licence, medical, recurrent training, type currency, and any route or airport qualification the season's schedule needs. Then put those dates on the same list as everything else. A training slot booked three months out is routine. A training slot booked in the week you need the aeroplane is not always available at any price.

The ground side

The unglamorous half, and the half that produces the surprises:

• Handling and FBO accounts at the airports the season actually uses, opened and credit-checked before the first trip rather than during it.
• Fuel arrangements and whichever card or contract the crew present.
• Overflight and landing permits for anywhere that needs lead time.
• Catering and transport standing arrangements, if they exist, confirmed for the season rather than assumed from last year.

The week before the first trip

Fly it before you need it. A positioning flight or a maintenance check flight a week out finds the things that only appear under load, at a point where there is still time to fix them. It is the single most useful item on this list and the one most often skipped, because it costs money to do and nothing visible to skip.

What to hold on file

When the season starts, one record should hold: current airworthiness and registration documents, the insurance certificate with its limits and conditions, the maintenance programme and the last inspection reports, open deferred defects with owners and dates, crew documents with expiry dates, and the standing ground arrangements with their account references.

Held together, that list answers "can we go on Thursday" in a minute. Held across an inbox, a filing cabinet and three people's memories, it does not answer it at all. That is the case for keeping the operating record in one place: see how the operations view works, or read what a garage of rarely driven cars needs, which is the same problem at a smaller scale and a larger count.