Technical Notes of our Aircraft
If you are the owner of a DG sailplane, and perhaps you bought it used, you have to know if all the Technical Bulletins for the type have been complied with, or if new ones are available.
We used to send the Technical Bulletins to our customers at no cost, but the postage costs were staggering. Please understand that we want to provide this service with the modern communications media such as e-mail and the Internet.
It's quite simple:
Subscription for Newsletters
All Technical Bulletins are available immediately, and can be downloaded together with the pertinent flight manual pages. If you do not have e-mail access but have Internet connection you can visit our site and see for yourself if there is any news pertaining to your sailplane.
In exceptional cases you can still receive the Technical Bulletins by mail, but that can no longer be done free of charge and will require a subscription, as other repair shops have.
If you only want to get a few papers, please accept that we have to charge you our cost-price. And probably you will think, that this is extremely expensive.
So please use our internet offer - free of charge!
An explanation how to read our Serial Numbers
Please select type of aircraft:
In each directory you will find an Overview of all technical notes for
your type of glider and in the folders all TN`s are listed.
A. General
general TN's for all DG and LS types
B. DG Gliders
Overview about all Types of DG Gliders ever built All Issues of Type Certificates DG | |
LS Gliders | |
Overview about all Types of LS Gliders built until 2003 All Issues of Type Certificates LS List of the valid manuals of all LS-Types D. Additional Technical Documents | |
Service Infos of DG Flugzeugbau
Service- and Repair Work made directly by the Manufacturer
Maintenance Work and 25 h Inspection for DG Gliders
The cost of some Technical Bulletins
Usually, Technical Bulletin (TBs) issues are free for aircraft owners. And we want to keep it that way for the majority of the TBs for current aircraft, as far as enhancements or modifications concerning design flaws are concerned. The costs we incur during this process are filed under "product enhancement", and the TBs are made available here for downloading free of charge.
Unfortunately, since the creation of the EASA, we manufacturers and service companies are now faced with a whole host of overheads, which we just cannot bear alone any longer. We have to pass them on somehow.
- We pay three registration fees, for example:
- one for the registration as a manufacturer
- one for our development activities
- and one for our service provision, and they are recurring at regular intervals
- For each aircraft type we support (DG-100, DG-500, LS1, LS3 etc.), we pay an annual fee
- And for each Technical Bulletin we issue, we pay a fee to EASA. This also applies to older aircraft, which we have never built and which we "only" support as a service to our customers. On the other hand: without this support, these aircraft would lose their type approval and could not be run any longer.
As an aside:
What about types of aircraft that are not made any more at all, and for which the original manufacturer or some aviation authority has been providing the support, more as a favour than anything else?
Just think of a Libelle or the likes!
They all incur annual fees, and every TB also costs money.
Fortunately, this does not concern us!
However, we do have to say goodbye to free TN's for all owners all round; there has to be a fair financial contribution towards the costs. The EASA had some "friendly" advice on this subject when we tried to refuse payment for older types and their TN's:
"You'll just have sell the TBs!"
(In power flying, this has been done for a long time, by the way!)
At this point, we would like to make it very clear that it is not our intention to maximise our profits at our customers' expense. It would never occur to us! However, if you continue to provide services at great cost to yourself without charging your customers, you will inevitably go bankrupt sooner or later, as quite a few in our industry have found. We, on the other hand, intend to react in the right way, at the right time, in order to be able to provide type support for many decades to come! It makes sense, after all.
And what does this mean in practice?
First we have tried the following way:
All TN's relating to aircraft which are not being built any more, and which lead to enhancements, or help eliminate faults that have been detected late in time, were issued in such a way that they only become valid when accompanied by a release certificate from the T/C Holder (DG) for the aircraft in question. When customers contacted us to apply for a release certificate, they had to state the aircraft type, the registration, and, for some TN's, other information as well. These data were be entered on the release certificate.
The reaction of the "community" was evident:
There was a lot of trouble, and people cried that they did not like to pay any cost for services they needed to be done by us. Many postings only could be charactarized as "insulting" and I have asked myself, if I personally need to suffer such attacks!
That could not be the way for the future!!!
So the idea of the Service Agreement was created. This also have caused a lot of trouble, but one time only. Latest when other manufacturers will follow this example, everybody will understand the necessity of such an agreement.
So in future with a Service Agreement all Technical Notes are for free again.
With two exeptions only:
The first of these TN's is that for retrofitting a transponder. On this subject, we have a story of our own to tell:
We had issued a Service Note describing how to fit a transponder into DG and LS single- seaters. That way, we passed on all the information we had to our customers free of charge. As a result, we received a veritable flood of enquires concerning the fitting locations of all sorts of equipment and aerials, different types of aerials, potential radiation hazards, more recent types of transponder, and so on, and so forth. By now, we have spent many thousands of Euros on engineering hours and on transponder tests.
And we uncomplainingly answered all those queries, and recently started to pass them on in our forum for technical queries.
So far so good for the customer, not quite so satisfactory for us.
And then the EASA came on to us, asking us what we thought we were doing, as this was clearly an aircraft modification, which therefore required a "Technical Bulletin", which has to be approved by the EASA, and for which the EASA "naturally" also receives a fee! Thereupon I nearly blew a fuse and tried to avoid this extra bureaucracy and the costs that go with it. As a concession, we are now allowed to bundle a few more Service Notes into a single TB collection. But there was no yielding on transponders:
We had to do the work and pay for it.
And that is why, from now on, every customer who wishes to retrofit a transponder, or has already done so, will have to get the TN from us. However, we will use the revenues from this to continue to answer all queries on the subject of fitting transponders to gliders free of charge.