How Often Do You Require Maintenance Poll

[201er]

On average if you had to guess, once every how many tach hours are you having non-routine maintenance done to your plane? And I'm not talking about adding gadgets or sprucing things up, but more like required maintenance to stay airworthy. How long have you had the plane and has this gone down over time? Do you see any typical correlation between age of plane and this number (for example 10 year old plane every 100 hours, 20 year old plane every 50, etc)?

[jetdriven]

Ours has broken the alternator and the gyros in the first year.  other than that, its been reliable.

[201er]

With 5 repairs (aside from little squawks at oil changes) and 150 hours comes out to an average of once every 30 tach hours.

[pjsny78]

seems like every flight. but somewhere under 7hrs.

my books are riddiculous for 6mths of ownership.

[Hank]

1970 Vintage bird. Owned since June 07. Only a few problems in ~350 tach hours [more in my logbook, which is done per the yoke-mounted clock].

Non-routine maintenance/repairs:

-AI & Alt. overhaul, Sept 09 [failed pitot-static check during Instrument training]

-new capacitor in left mag for cranking, Dec 10

-rotating beacon died, Spring 11; replaced with nice LED

-altitude encoder intermittent--replaced, Spring 11 [sometimes it would broadcast actual, sometimes zero, once 27,000' and I even saw -10,000' once]

-tank reseal, Fall 11 [can't forget that one!!! It cost more than everything else combined, not including round-trip transportation]

That's about it, from what I can remember. Hopefully I didn't just jinx myself . . . . . .

Not included above is oil changes every 50 hours, new front tire, new mains to come soon, broken nav light cover [hangar rash!], lots of grease, lube and some wheel bearings at annual a while back, other little stuff that amounts to not much of anything.

[John Pleisse]

I do everything at annual if possible. I then run into about one speed bump every other year. This year, the fuel pump went south.

[RJBrown]

In the last 3 years 200 hours the only repair other than at annual or normal oil change was a Vac pump.

[PTK]

I have owned the airplane for 4.5 years and have put about 400 hours on it. During this time I have replaced the starter, the battery, and had a minor sensor repair done on the KG102A slaved DG. MSC annuals run ~2000$. The starter was a good excuse to go with the Skytec lightweight and shedd 10 pounds so I don't necessarily view this as a bad return. The Mooney has been very very good to me. No complaints whatsoever!

[Parker_Woodruff]

I'd say about every 50 hours I need something that's not an oil change.

If it doesn't need something, I could possibly be doing something to improve the airplane.

[DaV8or]

I've had the plane a year and a half, and other than the annual stuff, I've had the generator system fail (probably the regulator, but I switched to an alternator) my transponder encoder failed and still reads off by 200ft, my starter failed, my S-Tec altitude hold only works intermittently and now it seems I have intermittent connection to my tail nav light and perhaps my left wing tip strobe. In addition, worn out tires that I still have to change and lots of oil leaks that I have mostly fixed... I think. Oh yeah, I replaced the cabin door and baggage door locks.

It's always something. I'm hoping that as the years go by, it will settle down a bit.