Do you need an engine maintenance plan?

The concept is basically to prepay the costs of turbine engine maintenance. Airplane owners pay the engine manufacturer, or a service provider they trust, a fee for each hour an engine flies. Then, when maintenance comes due, the expense is already paid.

Airplane owners could escrow the future expense of engine maintenance on their own, or they could simply carry the expected cost of repair on their balance sheet. But that wouldn’t yield the second and crucial element of an engine plan—insurance against unexpected maintenance costs.

The concept wasn’t a huge success with airplane owners, but that changed in the mid-1970s when the brand-new Garrett TFE731 (now Honeywell) turbofan was installed on the Learjet 30 series and the Falcon 10. Many more business jets quickly put the revolutionary engine on their airplanes.

The TFE731 was at least 50 percent more efficient than the turbojet engines from GE and Pratt and Whitney that it replaced. That meant airplanes went again half as far on the same fuel, and engine noise was chopped at least in half. Plus, the greater static thrust of a fan engine compared to a pure jet reduced takeoff roll and opened up more runways for business jet use.

As expected with any all-new technology, the 731 had teething problems. It uses gears to power the fan, which means all elements of the engine must rotate during start. That’s a big load on the starter/generator, and there were reliability issues. If something went wrong, there could also be an over-temp that led to expensive repairs.

Perhaps an even more important issue for owners of 731-powered engines was the restrictive maintenance shop choices. Because it was unique, the 731 demanded an array of special tools and training to maintain. Garrett opted to authorize only its factory owned facilities to inspect and repair the 731, and that annoyed many pilots and airplane owners who were accustomed to selecting their own maintenance center.

Garrett’s solution to both the new design teething issues and the limited shop choices was to create the Maintenance Service Plan (MSP). As with any engine program, MSP’s hourly charge covered scheduled maintenance, but perhaps more important, it insured against premature failures and their potential very high cost.

MSP by no means made every pilot and owner happy, but it mollified them. MSP made the cost of operating engines on a business jet predictable. It was suddenly possible to budget accurately for engine cost, and there’s nothing the finance types cherish more than predictability. MSP has been so successful that the value of a 731-powered business jet without paid-up MSP is greatly reduced and is a huge drag on the marketability of the airplane.

Now all turbine engine manufacturers offer maintenance programs. Pratt calls its plan Eagle. It’s TAP from Williams. JSSI offer an independent maintenance program, as do others. Rolls, and then Garrett (now Honeywell) invented a good thing.

Turbine engines are different

I like to think of a turbine engine as more like leasing than owning. That’s because the certification of a turbine engine sets limits on every critical engine component, and when those limits are reached, you have no choice but to comply and pay.

The component limits in a turbine engine include inspection, repair, or replacement. The limitation can be based on hours of operation, cycles, or sometimes calendar time. Just as in a lease where you pay to use something for a specific amount of time, you pay the turbine engine maker to use the components in the engine for specific times.

That’s why the prepayment portion of the engine maintenance program is so logical. Pay as you go for a cost that is certain to come.

But the “insurance” portion of a maintenance plan is perhaps even more valuable. Even though certification testing—with wide margins—has demonstrated engine components will operate normally for a specific number of hours or cycles, there can be surprises. And when they happen, the cost of repair and downtime can be huge.

For example, the Williams engine on the Cessna Citation CJ4 I flew suffered a fracture on the fan structure at 1,000 hours even though the major maintenance interval is five times that. The full-authority digital engine control computers aborted the start because the fan wasn’t spinning up on schedule, and that prevented additional damage. Of course, it happened away from home, but Cessna’s mobile repair team was able to install a loaner in just over a week and return the damaged engine to Williams. Because the airplane is only two years old, a Textron warranty is involved, but so is the TAP maintenance plan, and working together, the impact of the failure is minimized.

Engine warranty

Five-year warranties are common on new turbine airplanes, including the engines, so why buy a maintenance program during the warranty period?

One reason is that the warranty may not cover scheduled maintenance, but engine maintenance plans can. An even bigger reason is that engine maintenance plans apply only when the engine has been enrolled since new or possibly since a major maintenance event.

To qualify for the plan, an owner would need to pay the fee for all the hours flown before entering the program. Airplane manufacturers will often pay engine program fees for the first year or more after delivery of a new airplane.

It’s an obvious sales advantage, and it teams the engine program and OEM warranty to provide total coverage. Engine program coverage is certainly an item to do your best negotiation on during purchase of a new turbine airplane.

What plan to buy?

All the engine maintenance programs offer varying levels of coverage. The levels, for some reason, always seemed to be named for precious metal, such as silver, gold, or platinum, or stones, such as diamonds, or numbers of diamonds. Choosing a lower level of coverage ccan save money if nothing goes wrong or leave significant gaps if the worst happens.

Scheduled maintenance events are the base and lowest cost for a program. Loaner engines, their cost, and availability assurances are a critical option to consider. FOD may be covered by your hull insurance, but maybe not fully, so what does the plan you select cover? It’s something vital to consider when selecting a level in an engine program.

One variable that is in almost every plan is the cost of shipping. I hadn’t given that issue much consideration before the engine problem on the CJ4. What does it cost to ship an engine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from wherever the loaner is to wherever your engine fails? I don’t know, but it must be a bundle.

Minimum engine hours

Engine maintenance programs have minimum numbers of hours that will be billed no matter how little you fly. A typical number may be 15 hours a month. Perhaps you can find a plan with lower minimums, or stretched over a longer time period, but there will almost certainly be a minimum.

The minimums aren’t usually much of an issue for corporate operators who fly often, but the owner can end up paying for a significant number of hours not actually flown. That can be a huge irritation, but I can understand why the minimums are in place.

It’s mostly the insurance portion of the program, not the prepayment of scheduled maintenance, that drives minimum hours in the program. By definition, unscheduled, and often very expensive, engine problems are not caused by flying the airplane. They’re surprises. A surprise can happen at any time, and the underwriter—in this case the maintenance program operator—needs to be building a reserve for those surprises.

Do you need a turbine engine maintenance plan? Absolutely yes. The market value of your airplane depends on it. You and your budget will sleep better at night. And the flexible levels offered in the programs allow you to take on some risks to save program fees if you want to lower cash flow while keeping the fundamental coverage in place.

J. Mac McClellan is a corporate pilot with more than 12,000 hours and a retired aviation magazine editor living in Grand Haven, Michigan.