Yes, has been on the cards for some time. Will be interesting to see how pricing of updates goes.
It does make me smile when I see they have managed to hang onto their POH-selling revenue, by licensing their POHs to ATP, who make their money by basically scanning the docs onto a CD and then selling you 12 copies of the CD, 1 per month, for about $1000...
A "proper" maintenance shop is forced to buy that subscription for every aircraft type on which they want to work on.
Needless to say many don't. I have a Feb 2006 TB20/21 ATP CD (which popped up on Ebay, following which the seller was promptly terminated) which I would issue to any firm working on the plane. Manufacture stopped in 2002 and there have been no changes in it since 2005...
I have bought a PDF of the service and parts manual for my aircraft (from a dubious source) and whenever I'm in the shop, I check their ATP terminal for revisions and if there are updates, I print those pages.
My plane was built until 1986 but there are still updates in the maintenance and parts catalogues. Cessna is rather good at supporting their fleet.
There are updates on mine too but they are extremely rare and they are only superseded part numbers of obscure parts, which I am not going to be buying anyway for routine maintenance, and if I was, the new P/N would be flagged as a replacement if I tried to order the old one.
Important stuff like AD checks are done with a different source which is online and any A&P will have access to it.
But that is the MM/IPC we are talking about here. The POH is the book which lives in the plane, and which probably never changes. A new AFMS might go in there...
Socata sell the POH for a few hundred € and occasionally new TB owners have to buy some supplements because they discover the POH which came with the plane has a load of stuff missing...
I just wonder why Piper did this. They sell almost no planes these days. Perhaps people like the POH on an Ipad and they didn't want to lose the printing revenue.
But that is the MM/IPC we are talking about here. The POH is the book which lives in the plane, and which probably never changes. A new AFMS might go in there...
Yes, and there is something funny for my aircraft. It got its CoA initially in Germany (brought in a container in 1979) and that required a German POH. At the time, Dornier did the POH translations for Cessna. While Cessna continued to update the POH -- which you are required to keep updated as a pilot -- Dornier never did a revision of the German POH and mine is original 1979 at revision 1. That is the only legally acceptable POH for my aircraft.
While POHs are copyrighted, the Dornier translated ones are no longer available from anywhere. I have recently read that the German CAA photocopied their reference copy for an aircraft that could otherwise not go on the German register.
In reality, I fly with a US POH, latest revision but I would never pay for that of course...
