Although some inspections are minor, others require an aircraft to be taken apart and inspected piece by piece. The examinations do have predictable costs, ranging somewhere between $50,000 to $300,000 for parts and labor. But, unfortunately for owners, each airplane, like each person, ages differently. "You can anticipate the cost of the inspection itself, but there’s no way to anticipate what they’ll find," Wollin says. Aircraft broker Cerretani advises owners to estimate the final cost of repairs at roughly three times the amount of the inspection itself—but expenses can run much higher. If a plane has been poorly maintained or stored in a sea-air environment even for a short time, corrosion may be evident. (This is why so many owners who fly to seaside resorts fly their jets home while they are on vacation. Keeping jets away from sea air can save hundreds of thousands of dollars over the long term.)

Once again, a dedicated mechanic can help lower these inspection costs. He should contact various facilities and ask for competitive bids for scheduled maintenance. These bids should include total costs and the length of time the plane will be out of service. Most facilities will want to know how much overtime an owner is willing to pay—if any—in order to get the plane back quickly. The mechanic will also travel with the aircraft whenever it undergoes extensive inspections and overhauls.

When owners go into these inspections unprepared, they run the risk of receiving shocking news. Owners of a corporate jet whose costs had suddenly spun out of control recently called in Conklin & de Decker’s David Wyndham to review the maintenance records. The jet had cost virtually nothing to maintain during the first year of ownership, but then had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in maintenance bills two years running. The CEO of the company that owned the plane was panicking. Wyndham sorted through boxes of maintenance bills that had never been reviewed by a manager. He found that the company had purchased the airplane when it was 10 years old. In year 11, the engines reached 5,000 hours of service, which is where some require an overhaul. Engine overhauls constitute an enormous, but unavoidable, expense. The following year, authorities required the company to inspect the jet’s 12-year-old airframe. This requires engineers to pull apart and X-ray the aircraft, presenting another huge, but inevitable, expense. The plane’s owners should have been warned about these inspections years in advance.

Wyndham explained why the plane seemed like such a good deal when the owners purchased it three years earlier: The previous owner sold it before having to incur these expenses. Unfortunately, the buyer had not anticipated these bills, could not pay them when they came due, and was therefore forced to sell the aircraft. Owners such as Ferraro keep tabs on all such inspections. Ferraro’s Challenger 601 will undergo its 180-month inspection in approximately three years. His chief pilot is already talking to him about the projected costs, and Ferraro is setting money aside.

Wyndham says his clients’ flight department managers, chief pilots or maintenance engineers should produce an annual report that anticipates costs for the upcoming year on a month-by-month basis. The report should include variable expenses, including fuel, overhauls and routine maintenance. Then owners can look at actual versus projected costs during each month. "If someone is just giving you one number every month and saying, ‘Here, this is what you spent last month,’ that’s no good," Wyndham says. "How do you know if that’s a fair number or an outrageous one?"

Illustration by Tim Bower.

Michelle Seaton is a senior correspondent for Worth.

Additional Information
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