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I found a split cotter pin on a landing gear strut last week in Bakersfield
Doing a pre-buy inspection on a Cessna 172 that was supposedly "hangared and pampered" its whole life. Found a cotter pin between the trunnion and the downlock that was split right down the middle. Not a wear issue, looked like someone installed it with a pair of pliers that had a bad bite. That strut's been moving for years with half a pin in there. Owner said it passed an annual 6 months ago. Makes you wonder what else gets looked at with a flashlight instead of actually looked at. Any of you guys ever find something that dumb on a plane that just came out of a shop?
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angelab625d ago
You ever find a screw holding a trim tab on that was so wrong it barely counts as an attachment? I pulled a drywall screw out of a flap hinge on a Cherokee once. Not even a self-tapper, just a regular coarse thread drywall screw with the black coating half rusted off. Plane flew like that for who knows how many hours.
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That drywall screw thing makes my skin crawl. But here's the angle nobody's talking about. Those shops that miss this stuff, they're not always lazy. Sometimes they're just running on autopilot from doing the same checklists for 20 years. The brain skips over things that look "normal enough" from a distance. Like that cotter pin, half a pin still looks like a pin if you're not paying close attention. The real problem is what I call "checklist blindness" where mechanics stop actually thinking and just start verifying boxes.
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