Aircraft records: what you can read before the inspection

An inspection costs money and time: a flight, an engineer, a slot on the ramp, several days. Logbooks arrive by email in a day, at no cost. The order of work follows from that — records first, travel second.

Below are seven things the paperwork tells you, and they eliminate half the candidates before you ever board a plane.

1. What the aircraft actually did

The listing carries one number: hours. The logbooks carry two — hours and cycles. One cycle is a take-off and a landing.

The ratio between them shows how the aircraft was used. Three thousand hours over one thousand cycles means long legs of about three hours each. The same three thousand hours over four and a half thousand cycles means short hops: the fuselage pressurised and depressurised four and a half times more often, the gear absorbed four times the loads.

Airframes age by cycles. Sellers talk about hours.

2. Whether the story matches the paperwork

Airframe, engines and components are tracked separately. Discrepancies between those records are events in the aircraft's history: an engine change, a unit taken from another aircraft, a period that fell out of the record altogether.

Every discrepancy has an explanation. The absence of one is information in itself.

3. The calendar

Some maintenance falls due by date, whether the aircraft flew or sat on the ramp: seals, hoses, emergency equipment, life-limited items with a shelf life.

An aircraft with 800 hours over ten years looks like a find right up to the moment you open the calendar section and see that heavy checks came due twice and come due again in six months.

4. The cost of the next twelve months

From the logbooks you can build the list of work falling due over the coming year: checks by hours, checks by calendar, life-limited items running out.

That sum is added to the purchase price. Two aircraft three hundred thousand dollars apart on paper can meet at zero after this calculation, and occasionally swap places.

5. Engine programme status

An hourly-cost programme covers engine overhaul. An active programme transfers to the new owner and forms part of the asset value. A lapsed or absent one means the overhaul risk sits entirely with the buyer.

Verify this against the programme documents rather than the seller's word: payments sometimes stopped six months ago.

6. Service bulletins and airworthiness directives

The manufacturer issues service bulletins, and the authority issues airworthiness directives. Mandatory items appear in the logbooks with a date and a signature.

An outstanding directive is work you will have to carry out, plus a question about how the aircraft has been operating until now.

7. Component provenance

Every installed unit has a history: where it came from, how much time it has, who fitted it. A unit without documented provenance comes off and gets replaced, and that is a planned line in the entry-into-service budget.

How to structure the work

Week one: request documents on every candidate at once. Logbooks, programme status, the list of work coming due, the directive list.

Week two: the arithmetic. Each aircraft ends up with three lists. Red — what makes the deal impossible. Amber — what converts into money and comes off the price. Green — what goes into the first-year operating plan.

Week three: travel to inspect the two or three candidates that survived the arithmetic.

"Give me a discount" loses to "here are eleven items totalling this much, and here is the calculation on each." The first rests on a wish, the second on a document signed by the seller's own engineer.

One rule about money

The deposit goes down after the inspection and the document review. Once it is paid, the buyer's negotiating position resets to zero: every finding turns from an argument for a discount into your own problem.