Is the Avionics business full of sharks and, if so, why, despite labour rates so much lower than your BMW dealer?

@A_and_C, what is the solution? To pay for the assessment first? There is always a chance that a company missess something and would have to fix it at their cost.
Or to just add %% to the total bill for contingency? That way the quoted price might not be very competitive…

I use an avionics shop which always gives two estimates before starting a job. One is the discussed and intended work to be done, labelled ‘best guess’ and the second is a ‘what if all we think of now goes South’. The real case is usually in between, but I have seen one of my orders falling below South.

Why is this happening frequently seems easy. We operate a very old on average fleet, few in numbers, with lots of tinkering instead of correct maintenance over the years – low numbers, high variability, decades of abuse and you expect a solid estimate for avionics work?

Well there are certainly sharks in it.

Your aircraft has a single comm replaced with an 8.33mhz unit. Its in your hanger and you get billed 3 days labour (2400 pounds) yet when you look at the webcam you see that it only took 3 hours (300 pounds).

Everyone says take the guy to the small claims court but you can’t because there isn’t anyone else.

A shout out for AeroFab at Thruxton, @wigglyamp kindly recommended them. Unfortunately they are not able to carry out work for N-reg. A colleague used them for major brain surgery (Arrow 2 going full glass and new autopilot) and was very pleased.

they are not able to carry out work for N-reg.

Did they say why not?

This thread relates to this one but is more general.

Yes. I got that one wrong.

It is not that people which know avionics are not sought after, quite the opposite. My shop has been constantly on the lookout but what I hear is that lots of people they could consider prefer to work in an airliner-oriented shop. 9-5 and fringe benefits lure.

I think @A_and_C, you have gotten the main problem reckognized pretty well.

If you open up a BMW, all of them of one series are more or less the same. The only difference may be different radio systems built in, but that is one to two boxes. So thy can fix, exchange, do stuff pretty much of the shelf within a forthnight or so if you’re really unlucky.

The better comparison would be an outfit who only caters to old timer cars or special vehicles, where you got people working who savour this kind of challenge. There on the other hand, you see very similar things happen. “good looking” cars go into a shop and, once open, turn out into month long projects.

Our airplanes are way different to the average BMW car. They are kind of Pandora boxes which, once opened, will have wiring whom only the long deceased guy who originally did it know how it works (if he remembers) and which offers traps beyond any expectation. Not many shops today have got mechanics and electronic guys like the folks up at Buffalo, who live and breathe old airplanes, and even those who do, the moment stuff goes unexpected, hours explode.

The shops are usually between a rock and a hard place. The rock is what they think they can get a customer signed on pricewise, the hard place is the sum of their fears in terms what can go wrong and most of the time will, but which, if offered, will send the customer out of the shop covering the 100 meters in 9.5 seconds from a standing start.

Sharks exploit that. But those you find everywhere. Reputation is everything in that field.

Apart from obvious differences between cars and planes, there are common factors where applicable e.g.

• The “classic” car restoration business is in many ways similar to GA and thus has the same % of sharks. We mistakenly used one such for a VW body repair and got thoroughly conned, and it was only a fortuitously worded email from me which prevented the con vastly exceeding the value of the car.

• Any business situation in which a dispute leads to a “storage charge” has the potential for the customer to get shafted over, and not only because the storage charge can be made quite substantial. Hence even I (not in the trade) know a bunch of people who had to walk away from the plane and any prepayment.

• A plane becomes unairworthy quite rapidly upon Annual expiry, and then much more expensively so after a year or two due to engine corrosion, which again leads to a pressure to settle “any” size bill.

• Anybody with enough daughters (to appoint to various CAA-mandated positions) can set up a Part M maint company.

• The technology, even 1970s technology, requires an understanding of “electronics” to actually understand what is going on, hence > 90% of shops just follow wiring diagrams; this is sufficient for the “middle part of the functionality envelope” but still lots of people end up with missing functionality.

• A high % of pilots will never discover the missing functionality

• As stated above and many times, a lot of planes brought to the shop are old junk, full of old mods, mostly no documentation, and how is the shop supposed to bill for unexpected issues due to that?

• There are BMW dealer type scenarios in GA. A Cirrus dealer has a very nice business; most customers question nothing, and pay any size bill. And there is more uniformity across the aircraft, and most are still relatively young. A 20 year old plane will be like new inside, and most Cirruses will have been worked on by Cirrus dealers. The actual work is not likely to be of a higher standard than average; I am well familiar with this but have been threatened with litigation (despite having loads of evidence including videos) so it’s not worth the hassle. And higher up (turboprops and above) it is even more so; I was hangared at one facility for 10 years and I doubt many bills were under 5 digits even for the simplest service. But even a Cirrus dealer can’t charge the BMW daily rates due to the competition from the other shops.

• Most people won’t post about bad experiences. There is the example of myself having been threatened with litigation, but it is a small world (if one company tells you to f-k off, your shop options within your country reduce by 20-100%) and most aircraft owners don’t want to wash their dirty laundry in the open. This in turn enables bad shops to carry on. With cars you have look up a firm on e.g. Trustpilot … which I didn’t do and had I done it I would have discovered that that “classic” car restorer had been shafting one customer after another.

I still wonder why the above shop won’t do N-reg. They just need an A&P to be around to “supervise” the work, then inspect and sign. Naturally I am not expecting to get an answer