We all know that aircraft ownership isn’t for shoestring budgets and neither are avionics upgrades.
One of the reasons you absolutely must bring the aircraft to the shop for an accurate quote is so they can identify systems and accessories that will need to be replaced or reworked while the bulk of the new gear is installed. They can identify problems with the existing wiring, antennas, structure and other things that can add to the bottom line in a big way. It’s better to know up front than to be surprised when you’re handed an invoice that’s thousands higher than you expected. But it’s also the shop’s responsibility to keep you informed of any cost overruns. That doesn’t always happen and for aircraft that haven’t seen avionics upgrades in a while—and even those that have been upgraded incrementally—there are plenty of gotchas that tip the budget, made worse when the project is quoted sight unseen.
Call me when it’s done
This is an abbreviated unfortunate story of a Piper that went in the shop for a major upgrade for a proposed GTN 650Xi installation to replace an early-gen GNS 430, while retaining the King KX155 navcomm radio as a backup. At the same time, a PS Engineering PMA450 audio panel to replace the King KMA24 panel and standalone intercom, plus a GTX 345 ADS-B transponder, were installed.
The aircraft’s new owner—already strapped because he paid a price that was at the upper limit of his budget for the airplane—sent photos of the panel to shop and they provided a proposal—sight unseen—for $30,200.
The new owner agreed to the proposal (not an official quote because the aircraft wasn’t inspected by the shop) and had the aircraft ferried for the work. Since the owner had worked with the shop previously on other projects, he trusted the shop to get the job done and to simply call him when it was done.
And that’s what the shop did and handed him a bill for nearly $6000 more than he expected. While the shop planned on using the existing comm antenna for the new GTN 650Xi, it has sizable corrosion at the antenna’s base and the fiberglass was worn off the rod portion. The shop installed a nice new one. And since it planned to use the existing altitude encoder with the new transponder, it found that the current encoder was intermittent at some altitudes. It wired up and installed a modern encoder. And since it found that the electrical bus had some broken wires, it completely rewired it and added new push-pull circuit breakers.
While these are all items that needed to be addressed, they’re all things that the shop could have spotted if the customer was more involved in the job and asked for a firm quote before it got started. Last, the shop dropped the ball by doing the work without keeping the customer in the loop.