Data fuels borescope backlash in PPIs
Pre-purchase inspections are a key step in an aircraft transaction.
As well as a noted wordsmith, Shakespeare knew a thing or two about pre-purchase inspections.
One of his most famous lines highlights an issue that is still a hot topic in business jet transactions today.
“To borescope, or not to borescope, that is the question,” the Bard wrote in Hamlet. More or less, anyway.
It’s a dilemma at the heart of the deal, with ramifications dependent on your viewpoint. Nervous buyers want the reassurance of a camera probe into the hot section of an engine to check for issues. Wary sellers fear big bills to rectify any faults found. If an aircraft deal is a house of cards, this is the most likely cause of collapse. And at the very least it can lead to stressful wrangling by both sides.
“Anytime you go look inside an engine, there’s risk,” said Greg Norwood, GE Aviation during a panel on pre-purchase inspections at our Corporate Jet Investor London conference recently.
Zach Ungerleider of Honeywell added: “You cannot unsee what you just saw.”
READ: CJIQ cover story – Planning the perfect Pre-purchase inspection
Which means that any defects will need to be addressed and paid for by the seller, with the added risk of delays because of a lack of parts or rental engines.
But while borescopes used to be commonplace in pre-buys, there is a growing feeling they are unnecessary for power units on 100% engine programmes.
“It doesn’t make any sense to do a borescope when you’re on an engine programme,” said Steve Varsano, founder of The Jet Business. “To go and look for a problem when no problem is obvious in any of the engine indicators, just why go look for trouble?
“Sometimes there are people just trying to be heroes. They’re trying to look good in front of the client.”
Airworthy engine
The borescope backlash is driven by the development of sophisticated engine health monitoring which can verify the health of an engine using real-time data, according to Delray Dobbins of Engine Assurance Program.
“The engine health data gives you 100x more confidence of the health of the engine than just putting a borescope in the hot section,” he said. “Chapter Five [the maintenance schedule of the manual] tells you all the inspection and the checks you have to do over the life cycle of the engine.
“If you do all those checks and it is current and it passes a ground-run check and there’s no squawks [defects] in flight, that’s an airworthy engine as defined by Chapter Five.”
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The wording of some Aircraft Purchase Agreements stating the engines must be “within all manufacturer specifications and tolerances” contributes to the issue, particularly on aircraft about 1,000 hours from a major overhaul, according to Dobbins.
“If a buyer wants something 100% within tolerances, he needs to go buy a new aircraft or new engine,” he said.
When asked their views on the issue, one audience member suggested that geography and location of the aircraft could be a factor in wanting to do a borescope, where the logistics for getting engine technicians in from the manufacturers is difficult.
Replying to a CJI LinkedIn post on the panel, Thomas Nash, lead airworthiness inspector at Gulfstream Aerospace said that just because a borescope identifies a defect, it doesn’t mean the engine is unairworthy. “It’s better to determine if you have an engine that is going to be fully functional or if you’re going to be removing the engine and sending it to the shop for tear down after your purchase,” he wrote.
Tyler Holt posted: “You can’t say the words ‘never’ or ‘always’ on this. It’s all based on the circumstances.” Denise Wilson, The Jet Agent said: “Not all programmes are equal when it comes to coverage and exclusions.” Roman Berezhinskyy, project manager at AeroVisto, said a borescope is a “MUST”. “You will have more information to make the correct decision or to negotiate a fair price,” he wrote.
Summing up, Dobbins added on the panel: “There’s some situations, geography factored in, where a borescope may be warranted.”
But he said the reason for doing a borescope should be clearly identified: “If you’re looking for wear and tear items covered by the programme, that’s where we’re starting to see pushback from the engine manufacturers, that now it’s driving a premature removal of the engine that was 100% airworthy before you found the one anomaly that you had no cause to find.”
Warming to his theme, Shakespeare had Hamlet pondering whether it is better to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or to “take arms against a sea of troubles”.
And with that, he nailed the whole puzzle of the pre-purchase inspection.
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