The staggering thing is that there are several people on here who seem to be maintenance people yet they cannot agree on the basics.
This sounds like Part M was designed for the French. You tick all the boxes, sign all the forms, and do what the hell you want. And the personal relationships between the owner and the CAMO are all-important.
This is great if you are a proactive owner who has got himself clued-up, and you have a trusted-relationship CAMO which will do what you actually want them to do and will generate "whatever paperwork" as a separate exercise. That is how a lot of maintenance is done, including most training fleets. I am happy with that.
What I find disturbing are some of the paperwork costs quoted. It cannot possibly cost that much to generate and complete forms. One can automate a lot of it anyway.
But owners who just take the plane to the firm, leaving a blank signed cheque on the seat, are going to get shafted, in most if not all cases. And, in some cases, the work done will be inadequate because even though most engineers think they know everything (because they have been doing it like this for 25 years) they actually don't know everything. So, in this scenario, nothing actually changes
