Eatin' Our Lunch...Again!
The Cheetah’s been back up for a little over a week now. I’ve flown a few short local flights in it, and the machine behaved just fine for me. The good news is that Connie took her first, official flight with an instructor and is now working on getting her private pilot rating. The bad news is the instructor came back complaining about the right brake on the passenger side being soft. I am getting really tired of the almost continuous maintenance the airplane seems to require, though I believe this problem can be solved with a simple servicing of the brakes. To be honest, I haven’t flown from the right side in a long time, Connie almost never touches the brakes when she’s over there, and the brake reservoirs are so hard to get to it takes some dedicated effort and time to check them. We had all the brake master cylinders rebuilt last year and the pilot’s left one replaced; that and the airplane’s recent month of downtime due to the starter problems have me hoping this is due to normal brake “bleed off”. I’ll know more after I have the brakes serviced by a mechanic over at Pearland on Tuesday morning.
We got the invoice for the starter, relay, and fuse repair and it came in at $1355, a lot more than I was expecting. I noticed that I had been charged $575 for a Sky-Tec 149-12LS starter, and I knew the Sky-Tec website had told me to expect a charge of about $355. A quick web check showed that Aircraft Spruce was selling the starter for $378 and Wag Aero for about $360, so I gave a Bill a call and questioned the charge for the starter. At first, he seemed ready to blow me off until I told him I had confirmed the starter model number and price; then, he responded he’d check into it on Monday and get back to me. Getting $180-$200 off the bill will ease the sticker shock a little, but I’m still scratching my head about why I’ve been so good at estimating our previous bills but really missed the mark on this one.
The good news is that we have enough money in a special “airplane” account we keep to cover the bill. The bad news is that we will wipe it out with this, and that means we have zero saved to help us get through the next annual. We typically put a little over $300 a month away to cover maintenance and annual costs. That’s not proving to be enough. There’s only five months until the annual is due, so we’ll have only about $1500 to walk into that with if we don’t do anything extra. A piece of good news is that I did our taxes today and we’re getting enough refund to bring the airplane fund back up to where it was before all this happened. I’m going to try to sock away an extra hundred or so for the next five months, too. So, we will be in reasonable shape by the time the annual hits. Considering the six grand we dumped into the airplane’s annual last year, one would hope this year wouldn’t be too bad.
I hate to say it; but one more major maintenance upset between now and the annual, and I’m going to be forced to put the airplane up for sale. Admittedly, we could handle all this if I hadn’t done all the computer upgrades we did; but they actually are more necessary than the airplane is. They certainly don’t break as much; but then they are not 30 years old.
We got the invoice for the starter, relay, and fuse repair and it came in at $1355, a lot more than I was expecting. I noticed that I had been charged $575 for a Sky-Tec 149-12LS starter, and I knew the Sky-Tec website had told me to expect a charge of about $355. A quick web check showed that Aircraft Spruce was selling the starter for $378 and Wag Aero for about $360, so I gave a Bill a call and questioned the charge for the starter. At first, he seemed ready to blow me off until I told him I had confirmed the starter model number and price; then, he responded he’d check into it on Monday and get back to me. Getting $180-$200 off the bill will ease the sticker shock a little, but I’m still scratching my head about why I’ve been so good at estimating our previous bills but really missed the mark on this one.
The good news is that we have enough money in a special “airplane” account we keep to cover the bill. The bad news is that we will wipe it out with this, and that means we have zero saved to help us get through the next annual. We typically put a little over $300 a month away to cover maintenance and annual costs. That’s not proving to be enough. There’s only five months until the annual is due, so we’ll have only about $1500 to walk into that with if we don’t do anything extra. A piece of good news is that I did our taxes today and we’re getting enough refund to bring the airplane fund back up to where it was before all this happened. I’m going to try to sock away an extra hundred or so for the next five months, too. So, we will be in reasonable shape by the time the annual hits. Considering the six grand we dumped into the airplane’s annual last year, one would hope this year wouldn’t be too bad.
I hate to say it; but one more major maintenance upset between now and the annual, and I’m going to be forced to put the airplane up for sale. Admittedly, we could handle all this if I hadn’t done all the computer upgrades we did; but they actually are more necessary than the airplane is. They certainly don’t break as much; but then they are not 30 years old.
posted by Andy Foster at 7:24 PM
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