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Rant: pulling a whole rack to swap one LRU is lazy, and a hot day in Tucson proved it to me
Everybody at my old hangar swore the fast way to change a transponder was to slide the rack out, pop the unit, and shove it back in. I did it that way for two years until a July afternoon in Tucson, when the ramp hit 111 degrees and one of the connector pins bent on the slide back in. We lost the whole comm bus and sat grounded for 6 hours tracing it, all because I skipped pulling the tray and checking the pins first. Now I pull the whole rack every single time, even when it looks like a 20 minute job, and my comeback rate on those swaps dropped to almost nothing. Sure, it adds maybe 40 minutes, but 40 minutes on the ground beats 6 hours of troubleshooting in a hot plane. Anyone else get burned by taking the shortcut, or is it just me?
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thea_carter10d ago
Oh man, that Tucson heat will get you every time. I feel you on this one, shortcuts always seem to bite back when you least need it. Better to eat the extra time on the ground than sweat it out chasing a gremlin later.
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