Hail season in North Texas, and why a maintained finish makes a claim simpler

An adjuster’s job on a hail claim is to separate this storm from every previous one. On an aircraft with documented condition, that separation takes an afternoon. On a neglected one it becomes an argument, and the argument is not about hail. It is about what was already there.

North Texas hail season runs roughly March through June, with the worst of it in April and May. We are at Dallas Love, McKinney and DFW, and this is the conversation we have every spring.

What an adjuster is actually doing

Whatever the claim, the adjuster has to establish causation and scope. On an airframe that means answering two questions: which of this damage is from this event, and what is the extent of it.

Neither question is about how the aircraft looks. Both are about what can be distinguished from what.

Hail damage on an aluminum skin is characteristic. It is dimpling, it is directional, it is concentrated on upward-facing surfaces, and it has a size distribution that matches a storm. It is genuinely identifiable by someone who does this work.

What confuses that picture is everything else on the surface. Existing dings, prior repairs, filiform corrosion under the paint, blistering, chalking, crazed transparencies and general finish degradation all have to be sorted out of the way first. Every one of those is a place where the conversation slows down.

Why documented condition changes the conversation

Not because it makes the aircraft worth more. Because it makes the before state a fact rather than a claim.

If there is a service record showing the airframe was washed and inspected six weeks ago, with condition noted, then the question of what was already there has an answer that predates the storm. If there is not, the honest position is that nobody can say, and the person who cannot say is the one making the claim.

This is worth being precise about, because it is easy to overclaim. Nobody is paying out more because an aircraft was clean. What happens is that the scope gets settled faster and with less back and forth, and on a large-cabin airframe the difference between a claim settled in weeks and one settled in months is real money in downtime.

Every service we perform is logged against the tail, with date, field, crew and scope, and it is retrievable by the client. That is not a hail product. It is just what the system does, and it happens to be exactly what somebody needs the week after a storm.

What to do before the season

Three things, none of them exotic.

Get the aircraft washed and looked at in March. Not for appearance. So that somebody has actually put eyes on every panel in good light, recently, and written down what they saw. A wash is the only routine event in an aircraft’s life where a person systematically touches every square foot of the exterior.

Know where it will be. Hangar space during a Texas spring is the single largest variable in this entire subject, and it is decided in advance or not at all. An aircraft that is normally outdoors and has no arrangement for a warning is going to be outdoors.

Have the record somewhere you can reach it. Not in a filing cabinet at the FBO.

What to do after a storm

1. Do not wash it yet. This is the one counterintuitive item. Wash the aircraft after a hail event and you have removed the ice residue, the impact debris and any surface evidence, before anyone has photographed it. Let it be documented first.
2. Photograph it thoroughly, in raking light. Dimpling is nearly invisible in flat overhead light and obvious in low-angle light. Early morning or late afternoon, on the ramp, before anything is moved.
3. Get maintenance involved before anyone decides it is cosmetic. Hail on an airframe is a structural inspection item, not an appearance item, and dimpling on a control surface or a leading edge is a different conversation from dimpling on an upper fuselage.
4. Then clean it, carefully. Once documentation is done, the aircraft needs washing properly, because hail events come with wind-driven debris and, in Texas, a good deal of agricultural and industrial fallout. A dry wipe on a debris-covered surface after a storm is the classic way to add a second category of damage to the first. The reasoning is the same as with wildfire ash.

The part nobody thinks about until later

Transparencies. Hail on acrylic does not always dimple, it stars, and small impact stars in a windscreen can propagate. They are also easy to miss because everyone is looking at the skin.

And the boots. An elastomeric de-ice boot takes hail differently from aluminum, and impact damage to a boot is a boot conversation immediately rather than at the next inspection.

The honest summary

Maintaining a finish does not prevent hail damage and we are not going to pretend it does. What it does is make the damage separable, which makes the claim simpler, which gets the aircraft back to work sooner.

If your aircraft is based at Dallas Love, McKinney or DFW and it is March, a wash and a documented look is the cheapest insurance-adjacent thing available. It is a normal service on a normal program, timed to be useful.