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"certified' parts
Yesterday, I attended a FAA safety seminar where the topic was
maintenance issues. I walked away with a few surprising nuggets of information. These issues have been discussed here in the past and some of the information posited here disagreed with what the FAA said. So, I thought it would be useful to list them here. Now, before everyone flames me and tells me I'm an idiot, these are not my opinions, they are the opinions of the Safety Inspectors at Washington - Dulles FSDO. Manuals: You must have current service manuals to do any (including preventative) maintenance on your bird. That includes all service letters. A few pilots grumbled that certain companies will not send the service letters to the owners. The Safety Inspector said that didn't matter. Missing a service letter makes the manual out of date and unusable. Parts: You must buy the parts from an aviation source. Someone brought up that landing lights can be bought cheaper at automotive supply stores than from aviation outlets at a fraction of the cost. The FAA wouldn't hear of it. It does not matter if the part is made by the same company with an identical part number, if you didn't get it from an aviation source, then it is not an airworthy part. The Safety Inspector gave three examples, the light bulb above, an alternator belt, and an air filter. I guess that the alternator belt part number you would get in a automotive store has fewer layers of material in it than the one approved for aviation. The belts were the same dimensions, but there was an extra layer in the aviation belt, but they both had the same part numbers. The air filter from some airplanes also fit some automobiles. Same Fram part number. The Inspector used this as a uncertainty example. Are the parts exactly the same, who knows? I was going to ask him how do we know that we're getting approved parts from aviation houses if the manufacturers use identical part numbers for aviation approved and non approved parts. But by the end of this discussion, he was getting kind of ticked by all the questions, so I took a pass. Logs: All preventative maintenance must be logged, including updating the database on your GPS unit. So, if you have updated your GPS database and did not log it, you're not airworthy. This one caught a lot of pilots. |
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