So you want to replace your Piper Archer spars?

pfarber said:
You musn't ship much. Insurance doesn't pay to replace an item, it pays the value of the item. At my old job we had two brandy new OCE printers shipped in. Had tilt monitors, this end up, no top loading... the works. Every tilt monitor was tripped, the no top loading protection (and fee we charged) was gone and two of the four tie downs (poly straps) were broke. Driver couldn't care less. He actually started to unload it. Told him no, take it back. That was $120k of damages.

But go ahead, trust 'a shipper'. The next set of printers were picked up in MD by two of us in a maintenance pickup. Those got home unscathed.

Lets see.. what else... $450 air receiver... dented.
Stack of CISCO routers (say $50k total) wet.
And more than a few things that just never showed up. Shipper said it was delivered and signed for. Our facitlity was 24/7/362 with a driver check in and out. We asked to see the signed papers... wanna guess if they had them?

So in my not so humble experience paying a nameless facless driver $4200 of (kinda) my money is a non-starter. No one care more about that item than the person paying for it.
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Shipping LTL parts in a cardboard box have no relationship to transporting a single item high value cargo. Damage to the wings would have transformed the aircraft into junk.

I've shipped high value products via dedicated shipper for years.

Your statement about insurance payout makes no sense. If an insurer pays for the value of a properly insured damaged item, it pays for its replacement. In one incident I experienced involving over $175K, the insurer paid for all costs, including all incidentals and loss of business income during the replacement delays.

Knowing how to insure losses is a requirement. If you ship palletized items on an LTL carrier and suffer loss, the carrier's standard insurance pays out on a per pound basis that is insufficient for anything other than toilet paper and boxes of breakfast cereal. That's on the customer for failing to perform due diligence.
 
$4200 for shipping. What would it have cost to rent a storage unit to store the trailer, and fly home commercially, and then back to drive it home when finished?
 
Rcmutz said:
$4200 for shipping. What would it have cost to rent a storage unit to store the trailer, and fly home commercially, and then back to drive it home when finished?
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And have to leave your truck out there for a month. At least $400 in gas, a hotel room$120, an aluminum tube ride home and back ($700 Portland to Indy) and an hour trip for someone to the airport to drop me off and pick me up so maybe $1300 and then it's likely going to be me doing it since I'm retired and frankly I had no desire to. Just like GA flying, it sometimes doesn't have to make sense financially to be the right answer.

Had a lovely flight Friday over to 6B0, Middlebury VT (which is a really pretty little airport) for the IFR Cert and getting the AP back up to speed - she's all ready to fly for the year.

pOqpIBq.jpeg


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Bell206 said:
Except if you cull out the spar only work its only around $32K and change. Which at $16K per wing is still comparable to what it cost to replace a spar 20 years ago at $10-$12K per wing on average. And considering Piper uses the new spar in production, spares are available which tends to be the main issue with this type work. Plus as I understand it, Piper has released a spar reinforcement kit which effectively doubles any life limit issues for certain aircraft at a substantially lower cost than a spar replacement. So if only a couple dozen or so aircraft out of the 20,000+ affected aircraft require a spar replacement don’t really see any market driver to increase the cost over the current $32K cost at a top-tier shop.
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Any ballpark on the cost of spar reinforcement kit?

32k for new ones or x for the kit. Is labor hours similar for each path?
 
Randomskylane said:
Any ballpark on the cost of spar reinforcement kit?
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No clue. Only heard there was one available but was only for certain models. Perhaps an email to Piper support will get that info? As to man-hour difference, unless the kit requires extensive non-standard disassembly to install, I would expect to see at least a 20-30% reduction in labor. However, sometimes a "repair" can cost more than a replacement if you can believe it.
 
Randomskylane said:
Any ballpark on the cost of spar reinforcement kit?

32k for new ones or x for the kit. Is labor hours similar for each path?
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The proposed AD (Proposed) has the following info for what it's worth.

190 work-hours × $85 per hour = $16,150 per main wing spar
Material cost = 4,000
Total cost = 20,150 per wing spar.

Whether the hours are high or low and the cost of the materials is certainly a moving target I suspect. As well, finding any A&P that will do this for $85 an hour is fiction.

As a measure of how accurate this AD is for cost it says 14,383 per main wing spar to replace them ($28,766 all in and we know how that works out in reality)
 
A rhetorical question: Should owners/operators of these pipers that should be inspected for spar fatigue cracks, be allowed to fly 'young eagle' flights?
NO!
 
Assuming the annual inspection has been done and the AD (s) addressed I see no reason why not
 
Pugs said:
Assuming the annual inspection has been done and the AD (s) addressed I see no reason why not
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Yep. Just like any properly inspected aircraft. They ALL have points of potential failure. At least this one has been identified on Pipers and will get more attention going forward.
 
Notatestpilot said:
A rhetorical question: Should owners/operators of these pipers that should be inspected for spar fatigue cracks, be allowed to fly 'young eagle' flights?
NO!
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Well, the FAA let ERAU kill those two souls that spur the whole AD in the first place, with zero consequences for that institution. As a twofer, they threw the cost of their profit-motivated malfesance onto us non-revenue owners stuck with the bag of externalities. I certainly was never made whole on a resale basis. Heck, they even dumped their entire Arrow fleet into the open market within months of the accident.

So yeah, I'd say good for the goose good for the gander on the YE thing.
 
hindsight2020 said:
Well, the FAA let ERAU kill those two souls that spur the whole AD in the first place, with zero consequences for that institution. As a twofer, they threw the cost of their profit-motivated malfesance onto us non-revenue owners stuck with the bag of externalities. I certainly was never made whole on a resale basis. Heck, they even dumped their entire Arrow fleet into the open market within months of the accident.

So yeah, I'd say good for the goose good for the gander on the YE thing.
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I would not let my kid fly on any Piper with that potential defect!
 
I don't let anybody I care about fly in an aircraft piloted by a person I don't know personally or doesn't have shoulder harnesses installed to include any YE events. If you don't want to kill your kids those Piper spars are the least of your worry.
 
My son has been flying them at school.
Told him to stay the hell out of Florida thunderstorms.
 
Notatestpilot said:
I would not let my kid fly on any Piper with that potential defect!
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The potential ADs and past AD's cover pretty much every piper single plane so I'd suggest you let your kid fly on some GA aircraft with no AD (Perhaps a Meyers is good for you?)
 
Notatestpilot said:
I would not let my kid fly on any Piper with that potential defect!
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Three PA-28s crashed after losing a wing. One was a pipeline patrol plane with extremely high time, ridden hard and put away wet. One was high hours accumulated in a relatively short timespan, used almost exclusively for pattern work, and there was information that the plane may have been used for aerobatics.

The third was an over-G by the pilot. The survivor claimed they were doing a power-off stall when the wings folded, but there was no evidence of fatigue or previously-existing damage. From the flight track, we all know what really happened was aerobatics. They had to pull something like 7+ Gs.

The AD is BS, with no basis in reality.
 
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ateamer said:
The AD is BS, with no basis in reality.
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I would not agree with that. I could discount the one that excessively exceeded the design limits for the aircraft while doing acro, but the other two are problematic. If the pipeline patrol plane had a lot of hours, maybe there needs to be an hour limit. And the Arrow that "might" have been used for acro? I doubt there is a 2,000 hour aircraft in the rental fleet someone hasn't used for something absolutely stupid. You (we?) can't have wings falling off of airplanes in normal flight.
 
When these airplanes were designed and built, nobody expected them to be in use 50 years and 10K hours later. Metal, especially aluminum, exposed to stress and vibration does not have an unlimited service life. There will be more such ADs as the GA fleet ages.
 
Then, there are the folding wing Cessna's. Any one of 4 bolts (one at each end of each strut) comes out and it's game over. Plus, the bolts are hidden under fairings so you won't know if someone failed to tighten a nut.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
Then, there are the folding wing Cessna's. Any one of 4 bolts (one at each end of each strut) comes out and it's game over. Plus, the bolts are hidden under fairings so you won't know if someone failed to tighten a nut.
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How many Cessna singles that weren’t flown into a thunderstorm have had a catastrophic failure?
 
Rcmutz said:
$4200 for shipping. What would it have cost to rent a storage unit to store the trailer, and fly home commercially, and then back to drive it home when finished?
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They have a private airstrip...

I would have drove it myself and saved 500 by not building such a large crate.
I moved expensive racing parts around the country myself many times in a pick up truck.
I was younger then, I could make 12 hour trips both ways with only a short nap in a rest area. Be gone for 30 hrs . Sometimes I made the trip because I wanted to see and touch the part before buying it. Sometimes I made the trip because it was faster than a shipping company could do it. Sometimes the part was too valuable to ship it, like a complete engine.

One of my wings was repaired by Williams, in 1990.
 
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kyleb said:
I would not agree with that. I could discount the one that excessively exceeded the design limits for the aircraft while doing acro, but the other two are problematic. If the pipeline patrol plane had a lot of hours, maybe there needs to be an hour limit. And the Arrow that "might" have been used for acro? I doubt there is a 2,000 hour aircraft in the rental fleet someone hasn't used for something absolutely stupid. You (we?) can't have wings falling off of airplanes in normal flight.
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The Riddle Arrow had well over 7,000 hours and 33,000+ landings in 10 years. The pipeline plane had almost 7500 hours.
 
The EAA should consider changing how they allow anyone with an airplane to show up at an Young Eagles event offering flights.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
Then, there are the folding wing Cessna's. Any one of 4 bolts (one at each end of each strut) comes out and it's game over. Plus, the bolts are hidden under fairings so you won't know if someone failed to tighten a nut.
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I torque stripe the lock nuts on my Decathlon strut bolts. Once a month I loosen a corner of each fairing and peek in to check it. Perhaps a bit OCD, but it adds at most 2 minutes to my preflight that day.
 
Notatestpilot said:
The EAA should consider changing how they allow anyone with an airplane to show up at a Young Eagles event offering flights.
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If that’s your cause, jump in and help. EAA publishes the names and contact info for their YE program manager and their safety folks.
 
ateamer said:
How many Cessna singles that weren’t flown into a thunderstorm have had a catastrophic failure?
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At least a handful. I don't have a solid number, but I have run across multiple NTSB reports.

At least one was due to a strut bolt falling out. Root cause for some others was less than clear - "pilot over-stress for unknown reason" (no mention of aerobatics) that, if I recall correctly, resulted in failures in the stab which lead to shedding wings.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
At least a handful. I don't have a solid number, but I have run across multiple NTSB reports.

At least one was due to a strut bolt falling out. Root cause for some others was less than clear - "pilot over-stress for unknown reason" (no mention of aerobatics) that, if I recall correctly, resulted in failures in the stab which lead to shedding wings.
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Maybe you can enlighten us? I just ran an NTSB Inquiry on single engine cessnas in VFR and used as a search "wing failure" and nothing came back. I tried "spar failure" and bolt failure, still nothing.
 
Doc Holliday said:
Maybe you can enlighten us? I just ran an NTSB Inquiry on single engine cessnas in VFR and used as a search "wing failure" and nothing came back. I tried "spar failure" and bolt failure, still nothing.
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If you use the keyword "breakup" you'll find a couple, mostly due to attempted aerobatics or loss of control, even in VMC, not counting more due to IMC spatial D and/or ice.

Nauga,
and some holiday Caroling
 
ateamer said:
The AD is BS, with no basis in reality.
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Except this event is exactly why ADs were developed: to address flight-safety issues. So on the basis of fact, the AD was warranted as there were 2 independent spar failures with 6 additional potential failure damages noted in the initial fleet review. Just as various Cessna had ADs released to address wing structure fatigue. Where I think the heartburn lies is with the "terminating" or recurring actions being recommended by the FAA to correct this flight of safety issue on Pipers. And since the original 1987 spar failure AD was rescinded for the same usage reasons as mentioned above, I don't think that argument would "fly" again since this was the 2nd spar failure inflight.

However, the existing 28/32 owner community did have a collective opportunity to push the usage type again as the main causal factor in the failure to mitigate any excessive terminating actions against the fleet. This was also discussed in a number of forums and posts here as well. Unfortunately, in typical fashion, there were only 430 total comments, out of 20,000 PA28/32 owners, toward both spar ADs currently going through the NPRM process. So while the AD was a valid requirement, I think the pending terminating actions could have been better argued by the owners especially since Piper was leading the charge just as they did in 87-89 for the 1st failure.
 
Ed Haywood said:
I torque stripe the lock nuts on my Decathlon strut bolts. Once a month I loosen a corner of each fairing and peek in to check it. Perhaps a bit OCD, but it adds at most 2 minutes to my preflight that day.
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Good idea. Ever found one to be loosened?
 
Half Fast said:
Good idea. Ever found one to be loosened?
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Not those, but a few others, yes. Most notable was the lock nut on the front of the tailwheel spring. It was about halfway off. I check it every preflight now.
 
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Notatestpilot said:
The EAA should consider changing how they allow anyone with an airplane to show up at an Young Eagles event offering flights.
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You’re right.

They should make a rule that YE’s pilots must have a federally issued document of some sort, certifying their credentials as a pilot, and another rule requiring all the planes to go through an inspection at least once a year. They should also require that the pilots undergo some sort of airborne review of their skills every couple of years.
 
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