A new wing is cheaper than a new plane 
Jujupilote wrote:
Keep in mind, however, that FAA cost
estimates are notorious for being low, so the actual cost owners pay is likely to be a good deal
more.”
For what it is worth, when my club did this inspection – and at the same time did Piper SB 1357 which is a wing rib inspection – the cost was about €1800 incl. VAT. About 2/3 of the cost was the eddy current guy that had to be called in.
A friend of mine with a maintenance shop did a dozen of these eddy current inspections today. They will be less than €500 of an additional cost to an annual.
Malibuflyer wrote:
And as Savvy writes: It would be a major challenge if you need to ship the wings from the shop that did the inspection to another shop to do the sheet metal job.
But would it? You’ve already taken the wings off – the additional work if the spar is to be replaced elsewhere would be to put the wings on a trailer. We do that all the time with gliders (and a glider club could probably lend an open top trailer, then you just make wing slings for it, hook it to a car and off you go. We trailered a whole disassembed glider in an open trailer like that from the Netherlands to the Isle of Man).
The charge differences for eddy current inspections are likely to be travel – both time and number of inspections it’s spread over.
alioth wrote:
But would it? You’ve already taken the wings off
No — you don’t need to take the wings off for this inspection. (Our shop also thought so but fortunately found out in time that they didn’t.)
WilliamF 21-Jan-21 18:50 94
A friend of mine with a maintenance shop did a dozen of these eddy current inspections today. They will be less than €500 of an additional cost to an annual.
When I had mine done (Post #12 above) it added about £300 to the Annual.
As Maoraigh says (#96) this was mainly in travel costs.
And NO, the wings did NOT need to come off: The spar was tested in situ.
Not going through in EASA land, obviously they will come with another criteria like airframe hours
https://ad.easa.europa.eu/ad/US-2020-26-16
https://ad.easa.europa.eu/blob/2020-26-16_not_adopted.pdf/AD_US-2020-26-16_1
As expected. Let‘s wait and see what come up with. Quite possible they will just replace „factored service hours“ with „flight hours“.
Oh, and it‘s kind of funny (and obvious) that they say that EU regulation doesn‘t allow the application of the FSH model on these mostly 50 year old aircraft… when an applicable EU regulation hasn‘t even existed until a few years ago…
I just read elsewhere from a student pilot at a small US school that they just did the AD inspection on all three of their PA-28-161s, and all three failed inspection with cracks in at least one wing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/lm7xqv/piper_cherokee_ad_suddenly_getting_real/
