Maintenance
Every aircraft you dry-lease is yours to maintain. Its maintenance programme is a set of checks, each due after so many flight hours, flights (cycles) or days since it was last done, whichever comes first. Each engine has its own hours and cycles, and needs an overhaul in an engine shop after so many of either. Wet-leased aircraft are maintained by their lessors, out of your sight.
The checks
- A check
- A few hundred flight hours or a few months apart. Eight to twelve hours in a hangar, overnight at your base.
- B check
- On some older types: every six to eight months, about a day in the hangar. Newer types fold its tasks into their A checks.
- C check
- Every eighteen months to three years. One to three weeks out of service, in a heavy maintenance bay.
- D check
- The heavy maintenance visit: every six to eight years the aircraft is all but taken apart. One to three months out of service, and a million dollars or more.
A heavier check includes the lighter ones: a C check also does the A check, and resets its count. A check that takes a day or less is line work, done at your base. Heavy checks can be done in your own hangar (one heavy bay) or flown to a contracted maintenance organisation, each with its own price and pace, and some only for certain types. The CATS Industry Report, in the Bookmarks menu, reviews them.
Work in your own hangar also needs enough engineers holding the rating.
Engines
Each engine has a serial number (ESN) and keeps its own log wherever it’s fitted. When one nears its overhaul it comes off at your base in an engine change (about ten hours, overnight) and is shipped to an engine shop. A spare goes on in its place: one of your own if you have one, or else one leased from the engine pool, which takes a couple of days to arrive and costs by the day. The overhauled engine comes back to your base as a spare, and within the week it’s swapped back in for the pool engine, which goes back.
Who books what
The planner books each visit ahead: line checks and engine changes about ten days to three weeks before they’re due, heavy checks two months ahead. It picks the quietest time of day for the aircraft’s sub-fleet, and for a heavy check the cheapest place with a bay free in time. Other aircraft of the sub-fleet take over its flights; if there aren’t enough, some are cancelled. If an aircraft flies more than expected, the planner brings its visit forward.
A visit away from your base is reached on an empty positioning flight from wherever the aircraft is, and it flies back to the base when the work is done. Heavy checks sometimes find more to do than planned, and take longer.
Grounding
An aircraft may run a little past a limit, by up to 10%. Beyond that it’s grounded: it won’t fly passengers until the work is done, though it can fly to the hangar. Its flights go to other aircraft, or are cancelled.
Maintenance control
The Maintenance tab (Alt+T, or type MAINT) lists everything coming
due across the fleet, soonest first: when it’s due at the rate the aircraft flies, what’s left on
the limit that runs out first, and the visit booked for it. Below are the selected aircraft’s
checks, engines and the spares for them.
- ← → move the selected visit a day earlier or later, and Shift+← → an hour. P sends it somewhere else.
- Changes are staged, in orange, until Enter books them; Esc undoes them.
- A visit you’ve moved is pinned: the planner leaves it where you put it, even if that’s after it’s due.
Visits show on the schedule in purple, and positioning flights in blue. The Fleet tab shows each aircraft’s hours and its next maintenance; the market shows a used aircraft’s log and what it has coming up, worth knowing before you lease one that’s nearly due a C check.