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Hung, you are nothing if not thoughtful.

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Wayne,
It seems to me that the term damage history is often misinterpreted or misused.
Damage that occurs as a result of normal operation (as in the case of the stuck valve) should not be termed damage history as the engine was performing the function it was intended to perform. Replacing a cylinder actually is just a standard parts replacement, not repair. The term damage history should be reserved for those instances where damage occurs due to forces outside the scope of normal operation (such as ground-loops, bird-strikes, prop-strikes, etc..).
Pulley's freeze all the time but we don't term that as damage history. Rusted cables, clogged injectors, etc.

Funny that the term damage history isn't in part 1 of the FAR's. But neither is the term airworthy!

Just some thoughts,
Mike Sammons

Say a student strikes a light pole during taxi and damages a wing. The flight school has a good used wing that is servicable
and yellow tagged. They replace the damaged wing with this one rather than repair the bad one.
They have just replaced a standard part with a standard part
haven't they? NTSB report on file and just a logbook entry.
no 377 needed.
Personaly I would like the replacement wing rather than a repaired wing.

Just my two cents.

Mike,
This is one of those cases in which we can agree to disagree.

The point of my original post was that damage that is properly repaired and documented should not have any tangible effect on the airworthiness or value of an airplane. Personally I would not be dissuaded from buying an airplane with ?damage history? alone provided that the repair was done correctly.

I am sorry that I cannot agree that a stuck valve, broken crankshaft, cracked head, and so on are NOT damage. It is a sorry state of affairs when we accept an engine breaking as ?normal?, but that is the way it is. To me normal wear on an engine would involve wearing out the bearings, rings, cylinder bores, etc. However, back to my original point; it doesn?t make any difference anyway.

Wayne, I totally agree with your original point. I see people trying to haggle the price all the time using damage history as leverage.
Mike

Officially some things will appear as damage history when researching NTSB and FAA accidents records on your plane and some things won't. My plane had a nose wheel collapse with the attendant repairs to firewall and forward but it wasn't "officially" damage history and when I asked the question to the seller he could legally say that the plane had no damage history by definition. I found this out later. On the up side, when the plane was repaired they rebuilt the engine, repainted the entire plane and I most likely ended up with a prettier bird with a lower time engine than I would have been looking at if that student pilot hadn't landed her hard.

Funny thing is that you can replace a part because it's been worn out and someone looks in the log books and sez "gee, that's good. The owner is diligent in replacing worn parts and now that issue is all taken care of"

But if a part was damaged, and then replaced, it becomes an issue of the plane being considered to be sub-standard.

I think part of the stigma is that "damage history" connotates that the plane was in an accident and that perhaps this means the plane is now bent, won't fly straight, or has some other demon that is not noticible to the eye but may come back to haunt the plane.

I'd say there's a difference between smashing it up in a landing vs. bending something because you forgot to open your hangar doors all the way before pushing the plane back (which I've never done by the way) and then getting the damage repaired.

Exactly!

Charles