This Maintenance Item is to give the VG 21 members some
insight into the new AD 1020-04-14. As
you recall in the last NL, Max reported the problems found on the vertical
stabilizer on several planes. I
will tell you briefly what transpired.
Being a licensed mechanic, I must report
such findings to the FAA, which I did, and they promptly grounded the two
planes [Brian Tetrault and Lee Beery's]
. The FAA Designated Airworthiness
Representative for our area said the repair was beyond his authority and
directed us to the FAA Designated Engineering Representative [DER]. The
DER wanted $1600.00 for the fix on the primary aircraft and then $800 each for
every aircraft that was repaired after that.
This left us with paying a huge price for his service or doing our own
design work and getting FAA approval by using a “one time” field approval,
a form 337. It took four
submissions of a 337 and 60 days. The actual time to disassemble the tail,
fabricate, and install the doubler, reassemble the tail and check everything
out was only about 14 hours. There
has never been so much activity at the
Varga
Service
Center
– ever! Tom, of Tom’s
Aircraft, spent many long hours working on this project. Steve of Steve’s Aircraft Service
provided a lot of insight as to how to work with the FAA. Approval for the second Varga came
within another twenty days.
I was told by more than one rep from the FAA that what we
achieved was rare and could never be done in less than a year. I’m sure this would have been true
had it not been for Max Bishop who was called upon many times for information
and we even called up retired aircraft engineers who I worked with before I
retired. The biggest thanks goes
to FAA Engineer Horsburgh as he provided guidance the entire time. There was a great deal of technical
data going back and forth between mechanic ranks and engineering gurus. Pat, of course, was doing all of the
correspondence for me so many thanks to her.
Max and I collaborated on producing a Service Bulletin for
Augustair and I want you to know it was 3 pages long, not the 22 pages that
were published. On the negative
side of all this, some individuals feel we created all this just to make this
miserable and to spend their hard-earned dollars. Guess you can’t make everyone happy!