Or worse. One of the many time-consuming nags that tag along with major and even minor maintenance is preparing the supporting regulatory paperwork. It’s one issue that sends some of us flocking to the experimental world and it’s easy to see why. For the maintenance troops, filling out paperwork is a huge time and money burner (padded on to your maintenance invoice), but good logs make an aircraft stronger at resale. Maintenance releases, FAA 8130-3s, log entries and weight and balance reports is the standard for return to service by a Part 145 repair station or an IA. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s paperwork-intensive STCs or FAA field approvals. If you’ve bought an FAA approval, you know the value of the FAA signature that says your wings are legal. Rule-benders fly the aircraft (not airworthy, officially) while they wait for approval, and some have snatched their airplanes from the shop because they got tired of waiting. These days smart shops know not to start the project without the approval already in place. Modify it first and risk getting stuck with a hangar queen.
That was the trouble for a guy who called looking for advice because a shop tagged his twin unairworthy during a prebuy. At some point, an autopilot was installed, but there was no paperwork chase. It wasn’t even in the weight and balance. It was presumably installed during a major avionics installation. It gets worse. The autopilot wasn’t STC’d for the plane, and the GPS that was installed wasn’t approved (via its STC) with the autopilot. But, someone installed it anyway and let it go. Fortunately for the potential buyer (and unfortunately for the current owner), the tech doing the inspection understood the mod needed at least some paperwork. One thing led to another and when he couldn’t find a flight manual supplement for the IFR GPS navigator (another requirement), he dug deeper into the paperwork. When he couldn’t find the flight manual supplement for the autopilot (critically important to the pilot operating the aircraft), it was time to make some calls.