Scooter
You are entitled to request the labour rate for any company that are qualified to do the work, it might be worth flying a bit further to get to a company you are happy with. You should have been given a detailed bill showing the work carried out, did you know what work was required at the time, as redeye said a lot of extras might inflate the final bill. I hope you did not pay for the re-balance of the blades, but having said that why did the blades require balancing at an annual inspection? There must have been extra work which you didn't mention.
Helicopter maintenance is not cheap, certifying engineers are entitled to a fair wage. One of the problems of costing jobs is that out of an eight hour day, only about seven hours can accounted for, toilet visits, tea breaks notwithstanding, management has to make up for that and on a three week job it is easy to hide the man-hours and I am not saying that happened in your case, but it happens. I once carried out a enquiry into a maintenance cost on a plank job, I interviewed the Chief Engineer to get the story and when I eventually, much later, asked for the final bill for the breakdown of the man-hours I found that the company had taken £10,000 off the bill even though some of the cost was down to the owner not taking more care of his aircraft.
Last edited by Oldlae; 29th Mar 2008 at 22:52.