new, refurbished DA40 woes

[delaPlanet]

My friend and I recently purchased a refurbished DA40 from Lifestyle Aviation in North Carolina. It's a 2008 DA40 XLS that went through a very extensive refurbishment (including a fresh engine overhaul). We took delivery on October 10th. My partner flew it back from North Carolina to Northern California over 3 days and the airplane has had nothing but problems since. I'm trying to figure out if these are just "minor overhaul gremlins", if the mechanics have been negligent, or if it's just a terrible aircraft.

The G1000 has been acting up since day 1. It has had a "Data Path Has Failed" message for a month. We have had people spend hours troubleshooting this to no avail.

The standby attitude indicator seems to drift in pitch.

There were 5 bolts missing from the wheel fairings - the nosewheel fairing was literally hanging by a single bolt (I removed it).

We had a local maintenance facility look at the airplane for its 50-hour and they found:

Hoses under the cowl that were worn/had holes in them.

An AD from 2014 for door pins that was never complied with.

Friction adjustments on the nosewheel caster were not adjusted making the plane fly out-of-trim (yaw) b/c the nosewheel would fly to one side.

Landing Gear wasn't tracking straight and after 50 hours the new, right main tire was worn to the cords.

PowerFlow Exhaust 50 hour inspection wasn't done.

Engine Baffle screws were missing.

On top of all of this, someone renting the airplane had a very serious emergency last night when the alternator died at 2am over the mountains south of Monterey, CA. The battery didn't hold a charge for more than about 15 minutes, so the G1000 went completely offline and all electrical power was lost. The pilot had to scramble to find an airport that was VFR, in the dark, with the emergency switch on and no ability to turn on Pilot-Controlled-Lighting. This could have been a tragedy.

I just can't believe how bad of a job this refurbishment was. Is this unreasonable? Are these typical issues with a fresh overhaul? The fuel pump is making a terrible noise, too, so I'm sure that thing is about to die.

Ugh.

[Colin]

I have learned a lot in over a decade of buying two planes, helping a few friends buying planes and listening to (and reading) a LOT of stories about buying planes.

Unlike cars, buying new isn't necessarily worry-free and better. (Once I had the money to, I never bought a used car. I hate buying problems.) The onerous regulations mean that a plane that is flying has to be kept to a certain minimum, which although it isn't perfect it is a lot different than an automobile.

The biggest mistake that you made was treating a plane that came from a "dealer" (I'm not sure there are official dealers of Diamond aircraft anymore, are there?) as if it was buying a "pre-owned" Lexus off the lot. Unless it came with an official 90 day warranty or something it's similar to just buying the plane from its previous owner. What I learned was that you never have the plane with the seller's mechanic and you insist on a fresh annual with a correction of any airworthiness issues. When I recently purchased the DA42 part of that was that they hadn't done the overhaul due on the left propeller. I believe it was a cool $15k for that and a few related items. There's no recourse for flying away with that and discovering it later, so you just have to be incredibly hard about all of it.

That being said, very little of what you are writing about would have been caught except by the best mechanics. A missing AD on a ten year old plane means fine-combing the logs. Some logs are a total mess. I paid a few hundred dollars to have the logs sent up to the Diamond factory and they had three pages of discrepancies. The mechanic doing the fresh annual answered some and had to just do others to take care of them. Thousands of dollars. Did you have anyone else look at the logs?

Canted nosewheel is a constant problem. Tiny fix to a pretty minor issue.

Landing gear tracking is a difficult process to do properly and I bet the majority of the planes out there are not tracking well enough to have their tire wear unaffected.

Sounds like a flight school plane that you got, and I imagine the wheel skits were removed entirely for a while.

I would have the LRUs re-seated and checked for bent pins. The truth is, I would probably fly the plane down to Angel City's MX and have them do an annual. But when I flew single engine I *really* never blinked on any of the maintenance necessary.

You had a renter fly a single engine plane and night over mountains in IMC? That is a sort of exciting flying that I have never been interested in.

Have you talked to the dealer about getting any of it taken care of by them?

[ZAV]

Ouch. That sounds like a terrible experience.

Who did the last annual?
Did you get a pre-buy inspection from someone other than the broker's maintenance shop?

[pietromarx]

I bought an airplane a couple of years ago from an extremely respected company and had a crazy amount of issues, too. Had to buy a new propeller, for example, and that added $26k or so to the cost. The fuel tank sensors, avionics master switch / solenoid, alternate air mechanism, yadde yadde yadde. And on a non-rental non-school airplane, too.

For peace of mind I just fix things and replace the problematic ones. It is expensive, but not compared to losing irreplaceable things (like people).

This said, the stuff you describe above is all relatively minor, especially on a plane with > 2500 hours on it.

For your mental sake, I would suggest that you go ahead and replace the battery (and standby battery), fuel pump, and attitude indicator. The fuel pumps always eventually go, so you're just doing otherwise deferred maintenance. The attitude indicator is not something to mess with. Batteries need replacing.

What happened with the alternator? I had one go out on a 2004 that was just due to a worn wire. Fixed in 30 seconds following a suddenly important landing at KPRB. If there is an issue with the alternator, replace it.

On the G1000, there is a wire either loose or disconnected in one of the plugs. Or one has chafed. There are multiple redundant data paths, but it will display that message if one goes down between any of the boxes. If you are not seeing a red X through an indicator then it is likely that you are seeing one of the duplicated wires coming from the engine box (GEA), air data / AHARS (GRS), XM radio (GDL), transponder (GT), or GIAs. Assuming that you have re-seated all of the plugs, then you'll just have to go pin by pin to find the wire. It will take a few hours of doing continuity checks, though maybe you will find a chafed wire in the engine compartment?

Any reasonable avionics tech can fix the issue. It isn't rocket science...

[delaPlanet]

Thanks guys -

Our big mistake was not having an independent mechanic do a pre-purchase inspection. We were dealing with a company and a maintenance team that had a great reputation (Lifestyle, Glenn Lawler) and they did a huge overhaul including a fresh annual.

I get that some of this stuff is impossible to catch until it fails (alternator control unit, for example), but if someone is putting a 0-time engine in an airplane, you'd think they would replace the cheap, worn hoses with new ones, you know? You'd think when they took the wheel fairings off, they'd re-install all the bolts that hold them on, right? I'm guessing (after talking with the pilot who made the emergency landing last night) that the battery wasn't holding a charge meaning it wasn't a new battery, either. For a $300,000 airplane with a 0-time engine you'd think they'd put in a new battery. Those relatively minor items combined with the terrifying emergency someone had in the airplane last night is just giving me the heebie-jeebies.

I used to fly CRJ-900 jets for the airlines, but I don't have a ton of experience as an aircraft owner yet. I've owned a 1973 Starduster Too biplane for 10 years, but that thing is so simple, and has been so reliable, I guess I haven't been prepared for these types of problems.

Anyhow, thanks for the input everyone. I'm hoping we get this stuff sorted out and the plane is sweet for us and our renters. Half of me wants Lifestyle to buy it back from us, though.

[pietromarx]

I'm with you. I was pretty surprised to see that airplanes being sold didn't have even the minimal amount of common sense applied to them. Old batteries, worn hoses, etc. Reputation of the seller doesn't seem to count for squat.

On the other hand, you are seeing issues most likely *because* of the recent major maintenance. The airplane is a system and will be stable so long as the system is stable. 50 / 100 / annual maintenance actually causes the system to wobble and that is when you will see issues. The hoses may be worn, but they worked within the old context. Same with the alternator, etc.

Once you've gotten the bugs out they'll generally stay out. Then you can return to the classic break-fix approach.

[ZAV]

I recently bought my plane and had an independent annual inspection. Cost 10K and I was not happy about that (since many people on this forum report annuals for <5K) but the shop was a Diamond Service center and went through every single check recommended. They found several things that were ignored in previous annuals (the wrong dipstick for years) by reconciling each AD had been done. They replaced worn hoses. They replaced fire/heat resistant paint on the cowling that had been ignored. I was impressed by their detail. I also went through all of the AD's and log book in great detail to make sure I didn't see themes of problems.

I had looked through a dozen or so airplane logbooks while I was airplane shopping and some planes just seemed to have recurrent issues over and over and some just had fewer problems.

I doubt the broker will buy the plane back.

[shorton]

When buying a DA40, I think the best strategy is to buy an average airframe with complete logbooks and no significant damage history. Have a Diamond Authorized Service Center do a pre-buy inspection (not the same shop that the seller or dealer uses). Then do the refurb work after you own the plane. Nobody is more motivated to make sure the work is done well than the person who will fly the plane for years.

You will also likely save money. The dealer (or seller) would not do the refurb work if they didn’t think it would yield them a profit.

[TimS]

Most of the items sound labor intensive, and will be a pain to resolve.
However, with that said, the reality is most of them are fairly minor. For the data path issue, do not just try and replace parts parts. Go to an avionics shop that has a junior member on staff that can spend the hours checking the pins, and connections. Or if you have the time, see if the avionics shop will let you check the wiring under their supervision (I did some electrical work on my Aerostar under the mechanics supervision, saved me about 8 hours of labor on the invoice).
Send out the fuel pump for an overhaul, before it becomes a problem....

It really does sound like a plane which was always flown until something broke, then repaired as needed. This will work for a long time, but it does eventually decreases dispatch rate. And this is where I have seen multiple flight schools and lease back owners sell the plane. Likely in this case, the seller, not the dealer stipulated what was overhauled. And since this is not a regulated market, it really is buyer beware, you can never assume what was overhauled.

I had a mechanic tell me once.
The worst thing you can do to a plane is let it sit. The second worst thing you can do to a plane is fly it.

Good luck, and I hope the rest of your ownership experience is better.

Tim

[delaPlanet]

We are starting to wonder if the electrical emergency our renter had the other night was caused by the essential bus tie breaker popping. I’ve been reading up on it and Glenn Lawler brought it up as a potential candidate. The more I learn about it, the more I think this is what happened. What a weird and confusing issue, though - it seems like the kind of thing that could happen a lot and there’s no annunciation for it or checklist or anything.