Originally Posted by
Robbiee
Most of the places I flew R22s seemed to just get rid of them at 2200 hours. I'm sure they didn't just throw them away (though who knows there certainly are enough of the little buggers around) but they did just replace them with another used (or freshly overhauled) one. Either way I never saw the same 22 twice at one school.
This has changed over the years as the overhaul policies have changed... When your only choice in the US was to ship the R22 back to California and wait six months, there was a cottage industry of people who would buy timed out hulls, overhaul them, and then sell them when the overhaul was complete. If I remember, a timed out hull was worth about $25K back then.
Now that just about anyone can buy the overhaul kit and have it ready on the shelf when the machine times out, I think it's a lot more common to keep the machine and just overhaul it as fast as you can. I suppose this depends a bit on your maintenance situation... One of the schools in our area has a single person maintenance facility... With private owners who need to be kept flying... Obviously they can't dedicate 100% of his time to an overhaul, so there is the question if you can afford to have the machine sitting there until he has the time to finish the overhaul.
At the school I teach at, with over 40 aircraft ( mostly fixed wing ) they have a big enough maintenance staff they can throw 3 mechanics at the task if they want.
The other obvious thing to consider is who owns the aircraft and who is paying for the overhaul. I imagine the equation is substantially different for a leaseback than for a school owned aircraft... ( assuming the school owns the maintenance department )