Insurance Information for SavvyMx Clients

Why does Savvy require SavvyMx clients to add Savvy as an additional insured on the client’s aircraft liability policy?

Savvy has to be very careful with respect to protection from liability, given the extremely litigious nature of today’s aviation maintenance environment. Savvy  carries its own aviation comprehensive general liability (ACGL) insurance. Savvy’s service agreement with its clients also includes a mutual hold-harmless clause.

In addition, Savvy also requires that every client add Savvy as an “additional insured” to their aircraft liability policy each aircraft under management. We require this for two reasons:

• In the event that the client is sued and Savvy  is named as a co-defendant, we want to be sure that the client’s insurer provides a common defense for both the client and Savvy. The defense can be common since the client and Savvy have signed a bilateral hold-harmless and consequently have coincident interests. Therefore, the incremental cost to the insurance company is negligible.
   
• In the event that the client’s aircraft is damaged and the client makes an insurance claim to cover the cost of repairs, we want to minimize the likelihood that the client’s insurer will bring a subrogation action against Savvy to recover those costs.

Having Savvy added to the client’s aircraft liability policy as an additional insured accomplishes these objectives. In our experience, virtually every insurance company that insures GA aircraft is willing to do this. Most major GA underwriters do this at no additional premium, since underwriters realize that Savvy’s professional maintenance management actually lowers their risk of having a claim. (A few underwriters charge a small additional “nuisance fee,” generally $100 or less.)

Note that Savvy carries its own $5 million Aviation Comprehensive General Liability policy which provides Savvy primary coverage in the event of a liability judgment, so the likelihood of any dilution of your liability coverage limits is extremely small.

Savvy’s requirement to be added to your aircraft insurance as an additional insured is really no different than when an aircraft owner takes flight training from BPPP or CPPP or FlightSafety or SimCom, and the training organization requires that it be added to the owner’s policy as an additional insured.

NOTE: The requirement that Savvy be added to the aircraft’s insurance as an “additional insured” applies only to aircraft enrolled in our full-service SavvyMx managed maintenance program. It does not apply to aircraft enrolled in our other services (SavvyQA, SavvyPrebuy, SavvyBreakdown, SavvyAnalysis).

How do I get Savvy added to my aircraft insurance policy?

Call or email your insurance broker or agent and ask that Savvy be added to your aircraft liability policy as an “additional insured” (AI). Ask your broker or agent to obtain a “certificate of insurance” (COI) for:

Savvy Aviation, Inc.
30 N. Gould St., Ste 7491
Sheridan, WY 82801

Ask that the certificate either be emailed to operations@savvyaviation.com or snail-mailed to the Wyoming address above; we much prefer that it be emailed. We will need to have that COI in hand before we can start managing the maintenance of your aircraft.

NOTE: At present, every major GA underwriter is happy to add Savvy as an additional insured. A notable exception is Aerospace Insurance Managers (AIM) who have been charging a $250 annual fee to add Savvy as an additional insured, so you probably should avoid AIM unless and until they eliminate this fee.

IMPORTANT: If your broker is unfamiliar with Savvy, make sure to explain that Savvy is not a maintenance provider, and is in fact forbidden from performing maintenance on your aircraft by the terms of the Savvy service agreement. If your broker has any difficulty with this, please ask him or her to contact us and we’ll help get things straightened out.