Nobody wants their airplane to fall out of the sky. So there’s an annual ritual called, with great lack of originality, The Annual. Once a year, a certified mechanic disassembles, pokes, prods, inspects, tests, verifies, and in general works his way from propeller to tail, looking for problems. If no problems are found, this is only nominally expensive.
There is no upper limit to what it might cost.
In an extreme case, it might be judged that the airplane cannot be economically returned to service and must be scrapped. Fortunately that is a rare occurrence. Still, owners sit on their edge of their seats for the week or two that this takes, waiting for whatever bad news might come their way. If you’re the sort of owner who views the entire machine as a black box, then you write the check, however big or small it might be, and fly home.
If, on the other hand, you’re mechanically inclined and pay attention to what’s going on under all that aluminum, you can’t help but wonder whether your mechanic remembered to replace every nut, bolt, cotter pin, hose and cable that he touched over the course of the inspection. So that first flight after the annual can be unsettling. Your preflight inspection becomes more rigorous than it otherwise might be, and you try to become attuned to anything the plane might be telling your. But eventually, there comes a point where you have to push the throttle all the way forward and slip the surly bonds of earth. Perhaps your pulse races a bit more than normal. Or perhaps you circle the airport a few times before leaving the area. But on some level, you realize that you’ve become a test pilot.
As you head away from the airport, you relax a bit and enjoy the scenery. Everything seems to be working the way it should be, which reassuring. Nothing sounds noticeably different, there are no new vibrations, and all is as it ought to be. You touch down at your destination uneventfully, taxi, and shut down. Your neck and checkbook survived the ritual, and you’re good for another year.
And perhaps you reflect on the combination of technology, finances, air density, gravitational force, and age in which you live, and give silent thanks for the fact something as special as the trip you just completed was possible. After all, from the dawn of time until about one hundred years ago, it would have been viewed as a miracle.
