There is a saying that buying a used car often means buying someone else’s problems. The same goes for buying a used aircraft, except the problems are usually significantly more expensive to fix.
A pre-buy inspection can help thwart some unpleasant surprises, but it can’t catch everything. That’s because sometimes information is hidden or missing from maintenance logs or the new owner is in a hurry and doesn’t get a pre-buy, or it is a “buddy buy,” where they trust the seller, only to learn later that the seller did not disclose some issues, and the cost of repairs to make the aircraft airworthy is close to or more than the purchase price.
One way to prevent this from happening is to have the aircraft maintenance records available in a digitized format that is searchable by the aircraft owner, the person maintaining the aircraft, and the potential buyer or broker.
That’s what Aaron de Zafra, the founder and CEO of Crewchief Systems, had in mind when he created the company that supplies an application that does all of that.
De Zafra’s interest in aviation goes back to his childhood, when he took flying lessons before he was in his teens. He worked his way through college in Colorado at a skydiving operation, where he learned about aircraft maintenance and the challenges of keeping track of records for multiple aircraft.
Rather than pursuing an aviation career, de Zafra entered the tech sector and kept aviation as a hobby.
In 2018, he was able to combine the two when he and his wife, Christina, who is also a pilot, founded Crewchief Systems, a maintenance tracking program that he describes as “electronic medical records meets Carfax for airplanes.”
For the unfamiliar, Carfax is a program that allows a person to look up the history of an automobile by the vehicle information number (VIN) so a buyer can determine its damage history before they commit to a purchase.
According to de Zafra, Crewchief Systems was created for pilots/aircraft owners, aircraft fleet owners, and mechanics and is a way to “do something meaningful to uplift the industry [and] pull it out of the technology rut that it was in.”
He said it didn’t make sense to him that it was so easy for the medical industry to share a patient’s records electronically, yet with airplanes this “’aircraft health information” was in paper books kept in bags and banker’s boxes and usually a challenge to access.
“Our goal was to create a new category of system and capabilities in what I call aircraft asset intelligence,” de Zafra said. “Aircraft asset intelligence simply means the aircraft is the center of the data universe. And we keep the data of that aircraft together with the aircraft through its service life.”
He said the information can be migrated, explaining that if he bought my Cessna 182 and I used Crewchief Systems, the sale would include the aircraft’s program profile.
“I basically buy it from you, and I just go into the profile, and I add my maintenance company onto the profile, and then all those records, all that time, all those trackers immediately slide into their fleet, and it becomes one of the 300 airplanes they maintain,” he said.
The idea is that this information gives the mechanics visibility into the aircraft before they see it. When it comes in for maintenance, they are already aware of the airplane’s history.
“It helps them orient in minutes so that they can get to the business of actually repairing it, inspecting it, doing what they need to do,” de Zafra said.
According to de Zafra, when they were doing the research for this company, they learned that 40 percent of mechanics’ time is spent on book work, such as going through logbooks by hand, page by page.
According to mechanics interviewed, sometimes an airplane’s damage history or a missing or questionable maintenance practice is hidden in the pages of paper logbooks. The print often is faded or the information recorded in cursive script that looks like it was written by a third-year medical student and cannot be read by the mechanic, or the required inspections have been delayed (such as when an aircraft goes out of annual) for several years.
None of these situations is good when you are looking for an aircraft to purchase. Just because an aircraft is older and simpler by today’s standards—for example, a 1940s design that was certified without an electrical system—that doesn’t mean it won’t have multiple service bulletins (SBs) and airworthiness directives (ADs) that need to be complied with to keep it airworthy.
De Zafra pointed out that a lot of people do not realize the complexity of maintaining an aircraft due to the required recordkeeping and walk into a sale uninformed.
“Crewchief Systems is like a patient management system of electronic medical records,” he said. “Every screw that’s turned, everything done, every record that’s kept that can be collected out of that aircraft we pull. We keep the data of the aircraft together with the aircraft throughout its entire service life, and even transcribe the data through various AI methods and make that a digital twin of the aircraft, so the owner can effectively manage the aircraft. Then it stands to reason that that information can be used as a Carfax-type assurance for sellers and drive transparency for buyers to buy with confidence.”
Crewchief Systems is designed for the owners of single aircraft as well as a fleet where a team of maintenance technicians are working to keep the birds in the air. The program has the ability to track squawks real time as well.
As an aircraft owner, having the maintenance history of the aircraft literally a swipe away on your phone or tablet can give you confidence, according to de Zafra, because often it’s just not enough to blindly trust the mechanic that the aircraft is airworthy.
“When I have my family in the airplane, I want to know what is involved beyond just an annual inspection in terms of requirements for service bulletins,” he said. “I want to know the service bulletins for the IO-360 [engine] with the Hartzell prop that I had.”
Crewchief Systems can also keep track of ADs coming due, along with aircraft registration, letting the owner know when it needs to be renewed in advance, since those seven years can slip by quickly when life gets in the way.
All the information is backed up to the Cloud for extra security. Because it’s digitized and searchable, de Zafra maintains it can save the aircraft owner or flight school time and money.
“What we’re hearing from our maintenance affiliates is we save anywhere between eight and 12 hours per aircraft, per year on unwanted book work by having everything organized, easily searchable and accessible,” he said.
Crewchief Systems tracks the make and model number of installed parts on an aircraft. So if an installed alternator fails, it’s easy to look it up to see what you need and then order the replacement part.
The program’s pricing ranges on the scale of the product, starting at $499 per year for single-piston aircraft and up to $2999 per year for light jets.
Rick Scarbrough, an Atlanta-based A&P/IA and aviation maintenance educator, believes digitization is the way to go. He said a digitally searchable logbook will also help a maintenance technician find an improperly worded endorsement
“[It] weakens the (logbook) entry, and if eroded enough, it could render the return to service invalid,” Scarbrough said. “AMTs should write up their maintenance actions as if they were going to be read aloud at a deposition in front of a jury. Yes, it is that serious.”
Scarbrough pointed out that digitized logbooks also make the pre-buy inspections for an aircraft easier.
“One can store digitized logs in a secure platform and allow the potential buyer and his/her maintenance representative to preview the records prior to traveling on site,” he said. “This could avoid potential pitfalls and allow the [maintenance] crew to ask specific questions of the seller. Saves a lot of wasted flight time going to see substandard aircraft.”
