Preventative Maintenance for Your Aircraft

Most of the time, you can’t predict when a breakdown will occur. When your aircraft needs repairs, it can take weeks or even months for the parts to arrive if you don’t pay extra for shipping. Preventative maintenance can help forestall these unforeseeable issues. Here’s how to reduce your risk of being grounded.

Know Your Plane

Airplanes are complicated pieces of machinery, among the most complicated available to consumers. Each plane has its own unique set of quirks, issues, and ticks. Learn your plane’s personality, research common issues, and keep track of issues that occur regularly. If you aren’t the first owner of the plane, try to get in contact with the previous owner and interview them about the issues the plane had before it got into your hands.

Buy in Advance

Once you’ve established what you need start looking at aircraft hardware kits and the less expensive parts that are wont to break down to have on hand. Having a small inventory of parts for your airplane will help reduce the time you spend on the ground. Obviously, you can’t buy all the parts you’ll ever need, but you can get the small things stocked up so you don’t have to wait for a few small screws.

Follow the Schedule

Check parts when they need to be checked. Don’t take shortcuts when maintaining, taking off, or putting away your aircraft. Many issues in an aircraft are caused by a half-finished job. Don’t get caught in a lazy pattern of only half-finishing pre- and post-flight checks. If you don’t have an exhaustive list of both pre- and post-flight checks, it might be wise to invest the time into developing that schedule.

Your aircraft is an amazingly complicated piece of human engineering. Because it is so intricate, there are myriad of things that can go wrong with it. Staying on top of common issues can help prevent larger issues from keeping you on the ground.