Maintenance and defects

An aircraft loses life on two fronts at once. The planned one: checks fall due as the hours pile up. The unplanned one: defects appear after flights, and a hard landing delivers them in bulk. Both cost money and downtime.

Scheduled checks

Checks are driven by the airframe's hours, not by the calendar: an aircraft parked in the hangar never gets any closer to one. The cost is a share of the aircraft's catalogue price, so servicing a widebody and servicing a Cessna are sums of a different order.

The hours in the table are real time the aircraft spends in maintenance, and it cannot fly during them. You can pull it out early for a surcharge, and the earlier you do, the steeper it gets: up to +20% of the work cost. Once the time is up, the aircraft is released on its own and for free.

What a check restores: A-check and C-check bring the airframe back to 100%, the engine inspection restores the engines, a cabin refurbishment restores the interior, and a D-check does all of it. Any check also clears the minor defects that have piled up — that work is already in the price.

What actually wears out

• Engines — about 0.5% per flight hour, so a full life lasts around two hundred hours. It is the fastest wear in the game, which is why the engine inspection falls due more often than the other checks.
• The cabin — about 0.3% per takeoff-and-landing cycle. It ages faster on short flights than on long ones.
• The airframe — from hours flown and from the way you land. On a used aircraft part of that life is spent before you even buy it.

Defects

• Wear defects — small and near enough unavoidable: a hydraulic seep, engine vibration, a dead display. They trickle in after flights and simply with time.
• After a hard landing (roughly 600–1000 fpm) — one or two more serious items: brake overheat, a leaking strut, wrinkled skin.
• After a heavy landing (beyond 1000 fpm) — a critical defect, and the aircraft stays on the ground until it is repaired.

Repairs are paid for, priced by the defect itself and by the value of the aircraft. When small stuff piles up, close it in one go: “Snag rectification” clears every wear defect at once with a 20% discount.

A personal hangar aircraft works exactly the same way, except that you pay: checks and repairs come out of your own account, not the airline's.