Airplane Maintenance Requirements

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village my name is Rodney Fielitz. I'm a certified flight instructor in Cottonwood, Arizona. And I'm here to give you the basics of what it takes to become a pilot. Okay one thing that we also want to teach you is the basics in the maintenance of the airplane. There's certain things that we can, as pilots, do. One of them is make sure our windshields are clean. All the windows are clean. Remove all the bugs. We also want to make sure the tires are inflated. The breaks are in good condition. There's no rivets that are popping on the airplane. We also want to make sure there are no dents. We check the oil. We check the fuel. Physically we look at the fuel. We use a dipstick or anything to manually check the fuel. You never trust the gage on the airplane for fuel. So the best thing is to get into a habit of always checking it. Anyways part of the maintenance is, it depends if you're flying an airplane like here at the airport. There's airplanes owned by other people that they let other people use. Like you can come in and rent. That airplane has to maintain a hundred hour inspection. Every hundred hours of flying time it has to be gone over. Basically they tear the cowling off of it and they go through, check the plugs and check everything out and drain the oil every hundred hours. Also every year. So if you come up one year and you have an annual due on December 1st and you had a hundred hour done on November 15th it doesn't matter you still have to do the annual. You can skip doing the oil if it's okay. Now owning your own airplane. That's another thing. There's also different things that you can do as an owner pilot. There's a lot of things, the maintenance that you can do your own. But most of it has to be done by a certified mechanic. And we will go out into the airport hanger and look at a mechanic and see how he works on the airplane. But again back to the basics is we check the oil, tire pressure, brakes, make sure there's no dents. All the screws for the inspection panels are in and not missing anything. And we make sure of all this every time we fly. It's more important with a rental airplane because you don't know what the guy did before you. So you make sure. Now going back a little bit on if you own your own airplane. You do not have to have a hundred hour to do your flying in. You can own an airplane without having a license. But you always have to have an instructor with you to fly. Again you don't have to have the hundred hour but you still have to have an annual."