The Squawk Sheet

✦   Preflight Brief

A clean fuel tank is an invisible asset. A contaminated one is an invisible deadline.

Welcome to August. The heat is finally beginning to retreat, and the calendar is already whispering about cross-country season — which means fuel tanks are about to earn their keep. Your mechanic can feel it coming too.

This month: the fuel system maintenance most owners defer until they absolutely cannot ignore it any longer. What your oil analysis is genuinely trying to tell you — and why reading it requires the same attention you’d give a preflight checklist, not a glance at a weather forecast. Plus clarity on insurance premiums as we head into fall, and what the actual numbers are revealing about aircraft ownership in 2026.

We’re also introducing Anthony Quinn, our Operations Manager — the kind of person you notice not by what he says, but by what doesn’t go wrong anymore. Meet the Crew continues.

The fuel selector valve does not announce its troubles. No AD has ever specified it as an unsafe condition. No emergency traffic has ever asked a pilot to return to the field because of selector problems. Which is exactly why most aircraft owners never examine one until it behaves unexpectedly at altitude — when options narrow and margins shrink. Lycoming Service Bulletin No. 342-H, released in May 2026, formally specifies inspection and maintenance procedures for fuel lines and selector valve support clamps on all fuel-injected engine models. It exists because a quietly growing population of fuel selector valves — especially on higher-time aircraft — exhibits corrosion and binding that remains invisible until the moment it matters most.

Why This Matters

A binding selector valve arrives quietly. The first hint is a subtle hesitation in fuel flow, a pressure fluctuation at altitude, or worst case — a partial starvation during a turn or climb when power is already commanded. These are not catastrophic events. They are distractions: moments when a pilot's attention diverts to engine instruments instead of staying ahead of the airplane. The selector is mechanically simple — a rotating shaft with ports that meter fuel from left, right, or both tanks. But simplicity does not protect against corrosion. Moisture ingestion, common in coastal climates and in aircraft between long storage intervals, corrodes internal surfaces, creates friction, and gradually restricts the fuel passages. The process is silent and invisible until it is not.

Lycoming SB 342-H defines the procedure: visual inspection of all fuel lines for signs of corrosion (discoloration, pitting), a functional test of the selector through full range. For higher-time aircraft or those with known moisture exposure — coastal hangars, seasonal storage, northern winters — the SB goes deeper: full valve disassembly, internal inspection, and replacement of seals and screens if corrosion or debris is discovered. It is not an overnight repair, but it is not an overhaul either. It is accessible maintenance that matters.

Most owners never request this inspection because the selector valve does not light up on glass cockpits or appear on annual checklists unless someone specifically puts it there. That absence of visibility is the entire risk. Before cross-country season, allocate two hours at your shop for a complete fuel system inspection per SB 342-H. It is the least expensive insurance you can buy against a fuel delivery event at altitude.

Most aircraft owners receive their oil analysis results and follow one of two scripts: panic at numbers without context, or glance at the word “normal” and file the report. Neither is useful. An oil analysis report is not a pass-fail test. It is a written conversation between your engine and the people trained to interpret its language. Learning to read what your engine is trying to tell you — through numbers measured in parts per million — is the difference between owning an aircraft with genuine knowledge and simply hoping for the best.

Here is what each value means, and why the trends matter more than the snapshots.

After years of swings in the aviation insurance market, 2025 and early 2026 finally brought quiet. But quiet in aviation insurance does not look like quiet anywhere else. There is no rate war here. No promotional pricing. What exists is a market at rest: premiums flat to slightly down for disciplined piston aircraft owners, but only for those who fit a very narrow profile.

Here is what that profile looks like in practice:

Anthony Quinn arrived at DJS Aviation with over two decades of precision operations behind him — manufacturing, process control, commercial drone certification. Ten years at Dow Chemical, working through the ranks from operator to shift supervisor, taught him a hard lesson: systems scale only if someone is paying obsessive attention to the details that systems miss. That obsession with detail is Anthony’s signature.

In his first year leading operations at DJS, he redesigned maintenance scheduling to find cost efficiencies without sacrificing quality, deployed a regulatory tracker that catches SBs and ADs before they become deadline crises, and rebuilt how maintenance data flows through the shop. His commercial drone certification matters not just for its technical knowledge, but because it forced him to think about how safety systems integrate across different platforms and different regulatory frameworks. More fundamentally, it crystallized something he already knew: aviation is not theoretical. It is real. It has to work. When someone forgets to check something, consequences follow.

Anthony is a Victoria, Texas native, grounded in family — a wife and three children. He reads relentlessly on operations strategy and aviation logistics, mentors younger mechanics with the patience of someone who remembers starting. He believes every person in an organization should understand not just their job title, but why that job title matters to the whole. You can see it in how DJS runs now: better data, fewer cracks, things that should happen do happen.

DJS is fortunate to have someone of his caliber leading operations. We watch with genuine curiosity to see what systems he redesigns next. If he calls you about something, listen. His questions are always worth your time.