Chip,

Thank you again for being ethical and honest. Whatever short-term pain comes from this, will be more than made up for with customers who respect your ethical behavior. Rare these days.

Chip, are you asking the shop to do a “pre buy” (could mean different things) inspection or a documented inspection out of the maintenance manual? I would think that if you ask them to do a phase 1-4 for example, they must give you a list of discrepancies which would need to be fixed in order to sign off the inspection. Those would be your airworthiness items of course. Are you saying they won’t do that?

You are correct, but for the aircraft we do the only ones that get a Phase 1-4 are the King Air 90 and 200 series and Legacy Citations.

The TBM and Pilatus have annuals and are pretty straightforward, but Falcon 50/900 and 2000's (Dassault) Learjet 45/75, Challenger 300/350's (Bombardier) Citation 510/525/560/680 (Textron) Phenom 100/300, Praetor 500/600 (Embraer) are all airplanes that have complex maintenance schedules that don't have a good inspection to use for a prebuy other than the big inspections that seller's won't typically allow us to do early.

Pre-buys, no matter where you get them, are tricky things. There is no standard inspection, and there is no standard report. The buyer and the seller agree on the scope of the inspection and the effect of the report on the sale, and the buyer and the inspector agree on the format of the report. I find that, when I do a pre-buy for owners, I am usually providing both the buyer and the seller with a deep-dive into how pre-buys work and ensuring both understand how they will be affected by my report and what my report will look like and entail.

I would sue the bastards just for charging $93K for a prebuy just on principal! I have seen large business jet deals with less than a $50K prebuy on a $30+ million gently used business jet. You are still talking about 620 technician hours at a normal shop rates for a prebuy, not even a phase or annual.

I am gonna go vomit a little…

Thanks Ryan!

It’s sad, I think we all feel like we are getting screwed at every opportunity, quality and quantity have dropped and prices have gone up.

Nothing to do with prebuys, but just an example, I love these gluten free granola bars made by a company called Pamelas. In the last couple of years the price has gone from $5 a box to $7 a box, there’s only 5 bars in a box, so that’s a lot. Inflation, I get it. Raise your prices, ok, that’s business… but now each bar is 2/3rds the size it was, that’s dishonest.

I’m allergic to gluten so I don’t have many options…. there’s just more demand than supply. Just like maintenance.

The problem with ripping people off is sooner or later the market will change or a new competitor will come along, I don’t care how good of a brand you built, once they’ve found another option, the people you screwed will never come back.

I would sue the bastards just for charging $93K for a prebuy just on principal! I have seen large business jet deals with less than a $50K prebuy on a $30+ million gently used business jet. You are still talking about 620 technician hours at a normal shop rates for a prebuy, not even a phase or annual.

I am gonna go vomit a little…

Is there a contract? Does it specify the scope of the inspection? Does it require a list of each of the UNAIRWORTHY items? And why they are unairwothy?

I’m sure it’s all covered in the fine print that no one reads. The average buyer just assumes their next prebuy will be like the last prebuy and the one before that. You can’t change what you’ve been doing for decades, not tell anyone and then say “well the contract says” if they try that, they may win the legal battle, but they’ll lose the war.

I never agree to do prebuys on legacy Citations unless it's a friend. What you're paying for is NOT the time of the inspection, it's the liability if something is missed and they get sued.

Chip, that's the same reason for the nebulous words/reports you are getting. That shop has probably been sued after doing a prebuy! They either missed something and got sued by the buyer or said something derogatory and got sued by the seller.

It is risk driven, to be clear this isn’t one shop, it’s all of Textron, Dassault, and I haven’t had a chance to call and confirm but I understand Bombardier as well.

Welcome to the corporatization of aviation. Want to do business? You need a PO and the listing of the department head on the invoice. We don't do business with individuals. Parts? To the trade only. They don't have the time or the desire to deal with individual owners. Why? Well, they might check the invoice!

And airports are pushing out owners & individuals to make more room for these types of places.

Best,
Rich

There is probably training through a legal association. I don’t want to defame some of the aviation law associations. Plus, those attorneys talk amongst themselves outside of the associations. If it’s coming across manufacturers, it’s liable to land everywhere eventually.

I do know of a few pre buys on large business jets that found corrosion near the lavatory. That repair for one pushed the prebuy above $100K. However, when the DoM for the seller and DoM for the buyer had steaks and drinks, they were both happy with the outcome. The demo flight was fun! The pilot was a prior NASA pilot. He got approval for a climb to 10K. Sitting in the timeout box with AC in Savannah isn’t bad. We hit 250 at the departure end of 36 and up we went. By the time we hit 10k he had the route clearance over the Atlantic and continued to FL510. I gave up testing the WiFi and having a Diet Coke on the way down. They hung that plane on the flaps and spoilers on the way down and I swore I saw 5000+ FPM down as I came out of my seat and covered my little cup of ice and what was left of my Diet Coke.

I did emergency descents yearly during training in the TravelAir and 2000 FPM for the simulated fire was always fun. …but not as fun as the emergency descents in jets.

I miss my previous life but at my age much prefer a gentle VFR flight with a 300-500 FPM descent.

The reality is that the market changed and sellers found themselves with the upper hand in airplane deals, more than I have seen in my 20+ year career. In the past a seller might be upset with the shop over the results of a prepurchase inspection, but they simply sucked it up and paid the bill, got the airplane sold and moved on. Was it always right? No, but most of the time the findings we legitimate, in my experience at least 1/3 of the discrepancies found in a prebuy are generated by a logbook review and encompass past due inspections and required maintenance that was either deferred or unknown to the seller. To be clear, I’m not saying rarely, I’m saying the majority of the time.

There’s a bunch of hell being raised over a six figure bill, but $30k or more of it the seller should have already paid for.

Out of the thousands of prebuys at each of these facilities, a few disgruntled sellers raise hell and threaten to sue the shop for “looking at something they weren’t authorized to look at” which in itself flies directly in the face of the LEGAL responsibility well known to any A&P, and instead of the shop saying “it’s broke, you need to fix it” they wither under the pressure and put on blinders to do the next inspection.

That’s why our purchase agreements state “AN INSPECTION INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO” but of course, today that doesn’t always survive the seller’s attorney.

So, a few bad deals ruin it for everyone else, ironically the discrepancies found outside the workscope was probably the least of the seller’s problems with the service center, that was just the only point they could nail them on… and here we are. Currently, sellers and buyers alike are both upset, many will soon be headed to court, over a short-sighted policy change made by attorneys and accountants.

The pain for sellers and buyers will be short lived, by the end of the year every broker, dealer, seller, buyer and buyer’s rep in the country will know not to go to a service center who’s policy is to report findings instead of delivering an airworthy airplane to the buyer. The pain will pass for us, the customer, it has just began for the service centers. The loss of business won’t be limited to prepurchase inspections, bad reviews have no respect for boundaries.

I see only two scenarios where my company uses a service center in the future, when the airplane is still under warranty and when the seller is willing to correct all findings.

Why would we use them for the later?

Because the service centers will be able to get us in immediately, when all of the other shops are slammed trying to take care of all the airplanes the service centers lost.

There were a couple of comments made once or twice that I'd like to dig a little deeper on. Paraphrasing here:

'people seek out the factory service center for the log book entry'.

'there is no guidance to the prebuy except for 'XX' models'.

I don't do jets. I have done some pre-buys. Done per a suggested guide (say the ABS survey) and common sense of what is seen on in-service aircraft.

Log entry? No formal defined (regulatory or manufacturer's) inspection, so an log entry would center on any repairs made, whether authorized by the seller, or buyer once the sale is consummated.

To the question of how any of the notes are to be interpreted: GA manuals are often gray, and require personal interpretation. I get that, and because I don't do jets, I have to ask if this is the same way in that world? I do know in any area where the 'book says' you have 'this tolerance', and that tolerance is exceeded, and using the term 'airworthy' in the pre-buy report is perhaps redundant, is there a loss of connection?

To dumb this down to what I work on: A customer is looking to buy an A36, wants the spar carrythough inspected for cracks. A previously undocumented 2" crack is found in a radius in one corner, buyer passes on the completion of sale, Is this an airworthiness concern? Not according to AD, which references the original service bulletin. When inspecting it in accordance with the revised bulletin, it is. However, the original bulletin (as well as the AD) call for monitoring at reduced time interval. I would supply a logbook sticker to the seller noting such, and the seller should put it in the logbook.

I would think this would extrapolate to the jet world, no? Or is it simply 'a crack was found, up to you to determine if it is an airworthy item'?