What to ask before you hire an aircraft detailer

Most of the questions worth asking are not about the work. They are about what happens around it: who is allowed on the ramp, what the crew has been trained on, who pays when something goes wrong, and whether anyone can tell you afterwards what was actually done. Here are twelve questions, why each one matters, and what a good answer sounds like.

This is written to be forwarded. If you are a chief pilot or a director of maintenance being asked to sign off on a vendor, these are the things that turn out to matter later.

On insurance and liability

1. What coverage do you carry, and does it include hangar keepers? General liability is the easy one and almost everyone has it. Hangar keepers liability is the coverage that responds when the damage is to an aircraft in your care, custody and control. A detailer without it is asking you to carry that risk. A good answer names the coverages carried and offers a certificate of insurance naming you or your FBO as needed. It does not have to include the limits, and plenty of firms including ours do not publish those, but the certificate is real and it arrives without a fight.

2. Who is the certificate holder, and can I be added as additional insured? If the answer is confusion, that tells you how often it has been asked.

On access and the people who show up

3. Are your team members badged at this field, and what does that badge require? A SIDA badge is not a formality. It means a fingerprint-based criminal history records check and a security threat assessment through the airport authority, and it means the person has a documented reason to be airside. At the fields where we are staffed, our people carry the badge for that field and the badge and its expiry date live in our system rather than in a drawer. The list of fields is here.

4. Do you background check and drug test? We do both. Ours is not an FAA-mandated program, because we are not a certificated repair station, and anyone who tells you their testing is FAA-required is either confused or hoping you are. The honest answer is that it is our own policy, and that is a perfectly good answer.

5. Are these your team members or subcontractors? Not a trick question and subcontracting is not automatically wrong. But you should know who is standing next to your aircraft at four in the morning and whose training and insurance covers them. Everyone at The Allen Groupe is a team member. We do not call them employees and we do not sub the work out.

On method and chemistry

6. What product goes on what material, and why that one? The answer you want is specific. Cabin materials have genuinely different tolerances: leather wants a cleaner in the pH 4 to 6 range, wool is damaged above about pH 9.5, acrylic crazes on contact with alcohols under stress, and polycarbonate is attacked by alkalinity that acrylic would shrug off. A crew using one product across a cabin has made a decision, whether or not they know it. That is the whole of how we scope interior work. We wrote that one up at length in one product across a cabin is a decision, not an efficiency.

7. Is anything you use FAA approved? The correct answer is no, and a vendor who says yes has told you something important. There is no such thing as an FAA-approved cleaning product. FAA approval attaches to type design, parts and repairs, not to consumable chemicals. What actually exists is qualification: a formulation passes a battery of material compatibility tests against a Boeing or Airbus document, or is covered by an SAE AMS specification. That is a real thing and it is worth asking about. It is just not FAA approval. The full version is here.

8. What is your written procedure for this service, and can I see it? Not a sales sheet. The actual method the crew works from. If it exists only in the head of the person who has been there longest, you will find that out the week he is on holiday.

On training and consistency

9. What is this specific crew trained on, and when? The useful form of this question is per person and per service, with dates. Ours is recorded that way in our own platform, which is the entire reason we built it. Nobody performs a service they are not current on, and the record is retrievable rather than asserted.

10. If I use you at three fields, is it the same standard at all three? The answer depends on whether the procedure lives in a document or in a manager. Ask which.

On what happens afterwards

11. What record do I get? You should be able to find out later what was done to your tail, when, by whom, with what. Reconstructing that from memory a year on is not a record. Every service we perform is logged against the tail and the history is retrievable by the client.

12. What happens when something goes wrong? Ask it plainly, and listen for whether the answer has a procedure in it. Everyone has a story about a good outcome. The question is what the process is on a bad day, who you call, and how quickly someone with authority is standing in front of the aircraft.

Two questions not worth much

How long have you been doing this, on its own, tells you almost nothing. Longevity is real evidence but only alongside the rest of it. We have been at this since 1991 and we would still rather you asked question nine.

And what is your price, asked first, tends to produce a number rather than a scope. The number is only meaningful once you know what is in it. We wrote about what actually drives a price in what aircraft detailing actually costs.

If you want the answers to all twelve for your own operation, ask us and we will give them to you in writing.