Peter wrote:
The “classic” car restoration business is in many ways similar to GA and thus has the same % of sharks.
I tend to avoid the ‘sharks’ notation, as in my experience from classic car restoration the issue is different.
Mechanics and shops doing Classic Cars are similar to quite some avionics shops, they do it because they love to use screwdrivers and saws and soldering iron (at most) but are usually totally underdeveloped when it comes to business calculations. They show their enthusiasm and owners get fetched on that very easy – with the result the mechanic does not look for money, but suddenly realises the kids at home have nothing to eat, because hesheit spent too much time on his job.
Doing the things you love is not always the best way to survive, in dramatic contrast to contemporary belief.
Further on, modern avionics work does need a lot of skills to really master, but most mechanics don’t have an additional degree in electrical engineering – because doing work on small aircraft does not pay off as doing the engineering job at the next production or development company.
@Bathman
Since the plane is in your hangar and you have “proof” (however firm it would hold in court), I can’t understand why you would not have either
What is there to lose? You wouldn’t have work done by him, anyway, would you ?
Bathman wrote:
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).
While 3 days of labour does sound grossly excessive – a legitimate operation may well have only still taken 3 hours in the hangar but charged you for more labour. Since I’m on LAA permit, I did my own 8.33 installation and my LAA inspector just had to inspect and sign off as happy for it. I spent maybe 2-3 hours working on it at the airfield – but I also spent a day making up the wiring loom and testing the loom on my bench at home, and probably another half a day on making the worksheets, schematics, finding the data for the LAA avionics mod form and filling it in etc. So even in a simple installation, it’s quite easy to see “not much work done in the hangar”, but quite a bit of stuff done away from the hangar.
Similar story for our glider club radios. Vast majority of the work for those was done on the bench, away from the airfield (although bizarrely, the paperwork is easier for our certified gliders as it’s under CS-STAN – the LAA heavily gold plate radio work for some bizarre reason).
MichaLSA wrote:
modern avionics work does need a lot of skills to really master
Observing one of the Avionics Engineer at work installing glass on an older spam can in the maintenance facility next to my hangar convinced me of the opposite really. To spend hours and days on one’s back whilst the flap lever tries to disjoint the L04/L03/L02 vertebra, the handbrake lever pushing between your fourth and fifth rib, trying to decipher what the multiple wiring installations and modifications done in the last 30 year mean, then to install/update/calibrate/test the new equipment, respect and apply the different manufacturer, NAA, common practices, etc., procedures, is not a Joe Public thing, but a profession.
MichaLSA wrote:
doing work on small aircraft does not pay off
Yep, and that is set to become one of the problems in GA maintenance…
I would never go back to owning a certified aircraft, and for numerous reasons. One of them is maintenance and alterations.
Example, my steed was strictly VFR when I brought her home 4 years ago. I worked on her for about 3 weeks, spent about 12K€ in avionics, and had an almost new panel, now IFR capable (one never knows 
), and tailored to my very needs.
Beautiful panel work Dan!
One of them is maintenance and alterations.
I’ve posted this before and I will post it again 
If you have two planes, one certified and one uncertified, both with similar equipment, then the actually required maintenance actions will be same or similar.
So, you can reproduce much of the benefit of uncertified on a certified IF you have the right facilities and local connections. To start with, most of the extra cost of owning a certified plane is the result of most owners having to use a company for everything. This is because airport politics is usually rigged so that hangars are owned or controlled directly or indirectly by a local maintenance company. Whereas most homebuilders hang out away from such places; usually at “farm strips”. Of course someone will now pop up with counter examples / that this is the case only in the UK / is not at all the case in Sweden/etc but I do know an awful lot of pilots… and most of them simply cannot do this. What one tends to find, in countries with a “farm strip” scene, is that the certified hardware is based at “proper airfields” (with all the politics) while the Annex 1 crowd has moved out to little places with hangars where no questions are asked. The price paid is that the farm strip is waterlogged a few months of the year but the owners mostly don’t fly in the winter anyway so for the winter they have other toys.
This is obviously a generalisation but it is basically the GA landscape in Europe and the avionics business has developed to make money given this situation.
The next thing one needs is a freelancer to do the work. Right away this will be < 50% of the cost of using a company – for obvious reasons.
And this is where N-reg comes in, because there are way more freelance A&Ps (an A&P can sign off all avionics work, even work done by someone with no “avionics” qualifications, because avionics comes under “airframe”) than there are freelance EASA66 guys. But if I was G-reg I would be doing something similar (not quite as generous) because my A&P is also EASA66.
Getting back to the topic, freelance work is better for the owner because the buck stops with whoever did the work, whereas if you use a company, the buck stops nowhere – as I know very well. Read this under Installer Performance, and that was a “top” UK EASA145 EASA21 and FAA145 company. But as I said most owners can’t use a freelancer.
With modern avionics – basically Garmin or Avidyne or a few other minor players – the installation is simple. The wiring is highly standard. The hard bit is integration: ripping out the existing wiring without breaking the old stuff around the “glass”. And there are many gotchas e.g. the old fuel totaliser may not drive the new GPS. __Or the installer doesn’t have a wiring diagram for it so basically cannot get it to work, because 99% of installers have no means of debugging avionics interconnections (I mean looking at RS232 / RS422 / ARINC429 data) other than by trial and error.
I can see that a lot of companies in Germany have common politics. Get customer to the hangar by low offer or hourly rate and then rip him off by producing additional hours. They overshoot quotations 100% or more. Maybe this is why my small part66 business is successful.
I just make good quality job and stay fair to the customer regardless if he is millionaire or just cessna 152 owner.
Przemek wrote:
Get customer to the hangar by low offer or hourly rate and then rip him off by producing additional hours.
Looking at it from the POV of the avionics installer, I understand (but don’t condone) why they do it. Most pilots and aircraft owners are famously and notoriously tight with their money, and if you provide a realistic estimate, they just won’t have the job done. So companies make a low ball estimate they must know that is highly unlikely to be realistic.
It’s similar to government IT projects: at least for the UK government, the usual suspects (e.g. the likes of Crapita) deliberately lowball the estimate with the knowledge of two things: the government will NEVER approve the project if the actual price is quoted, and that the government always falls for the sunk cost fallacy, and will see through the project even if it ends up costing three times the quoted price. And civil servants keep falling for this practise time and time again.
If I had a certified aircraft, I would probably double any estimate I got to figure out what I’m really going to pay. Even if the installer gives their honest assessment, there’s a significant probability in an old aircraft of an unpleasant surprise when you take everything apart.
alioth wrote:
Most pilots and aircraft owners are famously and notoriously tight with their money, and if you provide a realistic estimate, they just won’t have the job done. So companies make a low ball estimate they must know that is highly unlikely to be realistic.
Mmmm, not sure I agree 100%. My experience has always been that the eventual invoice is double what was quoted. A given.
Not sure I really understand this because in all my business’s a quote, is well a quote. I stick to it, and my customers expect me to stick to it. If I am out, well silly me…
The part I fail to grasp is the……please tell me if you require to complete outwith the quote and please give me a new figure. None of them, and I mean none, IME have ever done this. A kind of grovelling well sir the bill is a bit heavier than we expected and therefore comes as a bit of a surprise when it is delivered.
And then of course, pay or sing for your aeroplane….Also the customer always appears to be the bad guy.
Peter wrote:
I’ve posted this before and I will post it again
A couple of points regarding avionics on homebuilts:
Oh yes, in most countries no IFR flying with those, makes me wonder how the homebuilt population survives at all
