Real-World Maintenance Case Studies & “Stump the A&P” with Mike Busch

Mike founded Savvy Aviation in 2008 and since then has served as its CEO and chief evangelist. His involvement in GA maintenance began in the late 1980s as a tech rep and instructor for the Cessna Pilots Association. He subsequently earned his A&P certificate the hard way — by swinging wrenches on his Cessna 310 and a few other airplanes for 10 years — and earned his IA three years later. In 2008, he was honored by the FAA Administrator as Aviation Maintenance Technician of the Year. He is the author of four books and hundreds of articles and videos about GA maintenance, and presently writes the monthly Savvy Maintenance column in AOPA Pilot magazine. He became a private pilot while in college in the mid-1960s, and subsequently earned instrument, commercial, glider, seaplane, CFI, CFII, and CFIME ratings. He bought his first airplane (a Cessna 182) at age 25, then upgraded to a Bellanca Super Viking, and finally to a Cessna Turbo 310 that he still owns, flies and maintains. Mike graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in mathematics, did graduate work in math at Princeton University and in business administration at Columbia University before relocating to California to become a senior computer scientist for a Fortune 500 company and later starting his own software company. He cofounded AVweb and served as its editor-in-chief for nearly a decade until it was sold to Belvoir Publications. He has lived on the Central Coast of California since 1980.