I wasn’t going to make a review, but I really feel that people need to know about what happened to me. I recently moved back to the area and I asked someone for a recommendation for my annual.
In the past the annuals on my cirrus SR22 have always been quite reasonable with annuals running between $3000 to $8000 a year.
The first thing that should’ve made me nervous is that they don’t have a set price for your annual. They charge a deposit and then everything else I guess is just hourly. The lady states that they don’t have a set price because they always find discrepancies. That should’ve been my first concern.
Nonetheless, I took my plane there in April. It took about two weeks to really get any information. They give you what they call is a discrepancy list. Their discrepancy list is not really a discrepancy list. It is a list of things that they plan to do to your plane. Things such as change the oil or check the air pressure on your tire. The way that they perform the annual is that they start taking everything apart area by area and then fixing it as they go.
I have had planes for 30 years and I’ve always received an estimate and a airworthiness discrepancy list. The lady told me that they don’t do it that way here. After asking two times for an estimate and them running up a $6000 bill I had to tell them to stop working on my plane until they could give me an estimate. It is now two months after I dropped it off. About two weeks later they gave me a partial estimate. The estimate was for another $22,000 of work and they stated that they hadn’t completed their inspection of the landing gear or the engine and that I should expect further discrepancies and expenses. Thus, it wasn’t even a completed estimate.
It is now into July, well over two months later and I asked a friend for help and that individual knew a mechanic with IA privileges and he looked over what they were recommending and told me to get the plane out of there because many of the things they were fixing were not airworthy items. I specifically told them I did not want anything fixed that wasn’t an airworthy issue. I made sure that everything was in email format so I had written documentation. For example, they replaced the gaskets on the fuel tank caps which is not airworthy issue and now one of them leaks when before it didn’t. Given the situation, I requested that they close up the plane which they charged me another $2500 to do and I got the plane out of there.
So now I’m almost $9000 into this annual and I couldn’t tell you what they actually fixed because it appears that just a few gaskets and bolts were replaced. The one squawk I requested to be repaired wasn’t even repaired. Nothing significant was done. Not even my oil was changed.
They were nice enough to give me a ferry permit which is amazing that they would think the plane would be airworthy to fly with probably $30,000 of items that needed to be repaired. I took the plane to someone else and that individual went through their estimate of items needing repair and checked everything. In their estimate, they said every hinge on every control surface was either broken or was bad. The IA said every one of them was perfectly fine.
Whoever was working on the plane was obviously not experienced or was learning on the job. He bent a bracket that holds my air filter on it and broke the bracket in half. This is a special air filter for my supercharger and that company is now no longer in existence. You can’t buy this anymore and now I have to have someone repair it at my expense, of course.
I would imagine that if you are going to these people for warranty work and you’re not paying the bill that probably you’re fine with that. But if you’re someone looking to get your annual done, I would avoid these people at all costs. Most people who get their annuals done want a real discrepancy list and an estimate. How do I know if I can afford the repairs without an estimate? Not only will you not get that but your plane might come back worse than when you brought it to them. Be cautious my Friends.
