MANIFESTO
A Revolutionary Approach to Aircraft Maintenance
by
Mike Busch
Copyright 2014 by Michael D. Busch
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1500209636
ISBN-10: 1500209635
Published in the United States by Savvy Aviator, Inc.
Las Vegas, Nevada
www.SavvyAviator.com
No part of this publication can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976. Requests for permission should be addressed to Savvy Aviator, Inc. via email: permission@SavvyAviator.com.
Cover design by Lynn Stuart.
To my wife Jan, love of my life, best friend, and steadfast companion for four decades: Your support, encouragement, and sustenance enabled me to live my life in hot pursuit of one exciting and fulfilling challenge after another.
P.S. Kindly do not predecease me as I cannot imagine living without you, and Ill be damned if I can remember how I managed before we met.
To my maintenance mentors Tom Carr, Steve Ells, John Frank, Bruce Hatch, Phil Kirkham, Paul New, Jimmy Tubbs, Dan Volberding, and the late Bob Mosley and Tom Rogers: I can never repay your generosity, wisdom, patience, and kindness in mentoring me from know-nothing nugget to A&P/IA to National Aviation Maintenance Technician of the Year, so Ill do my best to pay it forward by mentoring the next generation of GA mechanics and maintenance-savvy aircraft owners.
Table of Contents
Prologue
This book is the first of a multivolume set. I decided to create these books to anthologize and preserve the hundreds of magazine and e-zine articles and blog posts Ive written over the past two decades on a wide variety of general aviation (GA) topics, mostly maintenance-related. The remaining volumes in this set will be devoted to engines, airframes, ownership, and flying. Each will be an anthology of my most important articles on those subjects.
This book is different. Its shorter, pithier, and largely devoid of the war stories and nuts-and-bolts discussions that characterize most of my articles. Its purpose is to articulate my philosophy of aircraft maintenance and ownership, a philosophy that permeates all of my writing and speaking, and the credo that underlies my business activitiesSavvyAviator, SavvyAnalysis, SavvyPrebuy, SavvyMx. Hence its Manifesto title.
The maintenance philosophy I articulate here is admittedly controversial in GA maintenance circles despite the fact that its universally accepted in most other segments of aviation, including air transport, military, and bizjets. Maintenance of owner-flown GA aircraft is still done largely the same way it was done in the 1950s and 1960s. My goal is to help drag itkicking and screaminginto the 21st century. If that makes me an iconoclast, so be it.
Whats in This Book
My manifesto begins with some history lessons about the origins of modern aviation maintenance philosophy. It discusses the pioneering work of Professor C.H. Waddington and his team of scientists attached to the Royal Air Force (RAF) Coastal Command in the early 1940s, who were responsible for dramatically increasing the reliability and force-readiness of the RAFs B-24 bomber fleet by slashing the amount of preventive maintenance performed on them. I then fast-forward to the late 1960s and the groundbreaking work of scientists Stan Nowlan and Howard Heap at United Airlines, who independently rediscovered Waddingtons findings and took them to the next level by defining the fundamental principles of reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). Their work became the very foundation of modern maintenance practices employed by virtually every segment of aviationwith the sole exception of owner-flown GA.
Next, I address piston aircraft engines, specifically the misguided practice of overhauling them at fixed time-between-overhaul (TBO) intervals. I discuss the research of Dr. Nathan Ulrich, which analyzed the relationship between engine-failure accidents and engine time, and demonstrates clearly that the greatest risk of catastrophic engine failure is when the engine is young, not when its old. I make a case for ignoring recommended TBOs and maintaining and overhauling engines strictly on-condition, something the airlines have been doing for nearly 50 years. I offer detailed suggestions about how such condition monitoring should be donewith emphasis on modern condition-monitoring technologies like borescopy, digital engine monitor data analysis and scanning electron microscopyand how the decision when to overhaul should be made.
I then turn to aviation maintenances dirty little secret that nobody likes to talk about: Mechanics sometimes break airplanes while attempting to fix them. Years ago I coined a term for such events: maintenance-induced failures (MIFs). Theyre a far larger problem than most people think, accounting for one out of eight aircraft accidents and a large share of mechanical problems. MIFs are precisely why first Waddington and later Nowlan and Heap discovered that the best way to make aircraft more reliable is to do less maintenance on them. MIFs are precisely the reason I am an unabashed and outspoken maintenance minimalist.
I discuss how most A&Ps think, and why. Most GA mechanics are trained as maintenance maximalists. They genuinely believe that more maintenance is better (even though the data proves that its worse). Most are reluctant to try new products or technologies or to depart from traditional maintenance methods or manufacturer recommendations for fear of being sued; I call this defensive maintenance, and its every bit as pernicious a problem as defensive medicine is in healthcare.
My next focus is on the responsibility that GA owners have for airworthiness and maintenance. I argue that owners need to make their own well-informed maintenance decisions, not abdicate those decisions to their mechanics. I call this concept owner-in-command because it parallels the pilot-in-command concept that we all learned as student pilots. This Manifesto goes into some detail about the steps an owner-in-command should take to remain in control of the maintenance of his aircraft, and why simply rubber-stamping a mechanics maintenance recommendations could be hazardous to an owners health as well as his wallet.
Finally, I point out that the first flight after any maintenancewhether a heavy annual or a routine oil changeis always the most likely time for a mechanical failure to occur. Owners should religiously perform a post-maintenance test flight without passengers, in VMC, close to the airport, and (most importantly) with a test pilots mindset. This flight is the owners last defense against MIFs, and another responsibility that an owner must never shirk.
Acknowledgements
This book wouldnt exist without the enthusiastic encouragement and persistent prodding of my trusted consiglieri Adam Smith and Chris Wrather; the many merciless excisions by my awesome editor Mary Jones (EditEtc LLC), without whom this book would be twice as wordy and half as pithy; and the consummate skill of my graphic designer Lynn Stuart (Lynn Stuart Graphic Design), who miraculously managed to make me look good in print. But I wrote and proofread this Manifesto myself, so responsibility for errors or offenses herein is mine and mine alone.
Michael D. Busch, July 2014
Chapter 1 - The Waddington Effect
Maintenance isnt an inherently good thing (like exercise); its a necessary evil (like surgery)
