"buttman" wrote:
It's perfectly reasonable that a well maintained plane could have it's
logbooks go missing.

The flight school I work at has all the logbooks for their planes
stored in one room by the maintenance hangar. If that thing goes up in
flames, the planes are no less flyable.

Would you be PIC in an airplane if you KNEW no aircraft logbooks existed
for it?

Have something go wrong, and the first thing the FAA followed by the
insurance company asks for are the aircraft logbooks. Don't have them?
.... good luck ... hope you have lots of $.

Logbooks should be stored in a fireproof safe. And with today's
technology, not a bad idea to scan them and make a CD or two and provide
one to the insurance company. Yeah, it would need to be updated
annually, but if anything happens to the originals, you're never more
than a year behind in obtaining paperwork. Sounds extreme, but money
well spent, IMO. Gives me a headache just thinking of the red tape and
cost involved of having to re-create and/or redo, re-redocument,
re-certify shudder.