No Place for the Term “Invasive” in Aerospace Maintenance

By Carl Ziegler, A&P/IA

It’s hard to argue this scenario: You go to the hospital for any kind of surgery and the procedure has them lay the gas on you to knock you out and they zip you open. We can safely call this surgical pro­cedure “invasive.”

So, how relevant is it when journalists and writers in our aviation environment use this medical term to describe work on an airplane that involves significant disassembly and assembly? Especially when we use procedures that are nor­mally described in maintenance docu­ments approved by the FAA and/or man­ufacturers? To be frank with you (and my name is Carl), in my half a century of in­volvement in aviation, I can’t think of a time when I (or any of my cohorts) used the term “invasive” when working (or describing work) on aircraft that ranged from homebuilts, Cessna 150s through 747s or Airbus 350s. Do you know the secret label we use to describe some of the major work and repairs we do on large aircraft? One word. Routine!

English class time. When was the last time any of us actually pulled out a dic­tionary to look up a definition? I got the old book right here in front of me on my desk and I correlated its definition using good old Google. Let’s clear the air on the definition of the word being used to de­scribe aircraft maintenance.

In the Webster dictionary, “invasive” primarily means tending to spread aggres­sively or intrusively.

I checked several definition sources and I’m not quite sure how anyone is able to use the term invasive to describe any process that we actually do on an aircraft. There were all kinds of examples for sur­gical and biological operations, but I didn’t see anything relating to mainte­nance of any mechanical entity such as an airplane or aircraft engine. I felt cer­tain there would be a dictionary refer­ence stating that removing the engine or transmission from my Dodge Caravan would be an example of invasive me­chanical work. But alas, there was none.

We could call this invasive corrosion in the spar of this C177, This is the closest application of the word I could come up with.
A bit of grunt work to liberate the carry thru to allow replacement. Routine work in many shops.

Eyes over to some photos for this briefing. The first set of pho­tos is something I hope Cessna owners never encounter: the dreaded spar carry-through with corrosion. I found this on a Cessna Cardinal back in 2007! That is me holding the spar. Of course, the wings have to come off as well as everything attached to them. While some may call this an “invasive” type of event, as mechanics we just call this all in a day’s work. Routine. It is not like we are flying blind. Many manufacturers have sections in maintenance manuals dealing with structural repairs. Most of the time it is a great reference for accomplishing a repair as well as a legal reference for signing off on the work. Maintenance also has additional documents at its disposal: Advisory Circulars (ac­ceptable practices), Airworthiness Directives, and various service information from manufacturers. I’ll discuss the Cessna spar in another article. We got the Cardinal back up in the air with a ser­viceable spar. Time consuming, but routine.

A hanger fire toasted the RG I had started the annual on. Two weeks became 2 years! Routine!
New skin from Airbus fit just like a puzzle piece! Note the chem-milled inside, and no alignment holes to help install. None were needed. R&R easy.

Next, take a look at the roasted Turbo Skylane T182RG. Toast, you say! Nope. Paul managed to buy it back from the insurance company and, together with my buddy Tim, over the course of two years we had the wings rebuilt, reskinned the center section, and updated the avionics! We had this ride completely gutted. Working systematically, we had it better than before the hangar fire. Lots of manual references and even more common sense, and at a turtle’s pace, made this restoration routine!

Certainly, there must be something in our aviation sphere we can say warrants the “invasive” label? Ok, how about a little skin replacement on an airliner?

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Carl has close to 50 years of continuous experience working as an aircraft technician and 38 years as an IA. In addition to GA, he has acquired over 38 years of airline experience with Northwest and most recently with Delta, finishing his last 13 years of airline service as an aircraft inspector. He currently flies a 1976 Cessna 172N.