Loading…
8
The old timer in Tulsa who taught me to wiggle every connector before I sign off
About 6 months ago I was doing a pitot static check on a King Air at a shop near Tulsa and this older guy named Ray was watching me finish up. He didn't say much the whole time, just kind of hovered. Right as I was about to close the panel he asked me if I had wiggled every connector on that static line. I said yeah, I checked them, but he grabbed my hand and made me go back and actually push on each one while watching the test box. Sure enough, one of them had a tiny bit of play that wasn't showing up on the leak test until you touched it. He told me he'd seen a plane come back 3 days later with an altitude disagreement that traced right back to a connector nobody touched. Now I do the wiggle on every single sign off, even when the numbers look perfect. Anyone else got a check like that they picked up from someone older in the shop?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
iris_stone2814d ago
That story about the connector with play is the kind of thing that eats at you later. What got me was how the leak test looked clean until he physically touched it, which means the numbers were lying the whole time. Did Ray ever say how he figured out which connectors to push on, or did he just do all of them no matter what? I keep wondering if there's a pattern to the ones that go bad, like cheap fittings, certain years, or spots where heat and vibration hit hardest. Because if it's random, then the wiggle is the only real test you've got. What else did he make you redo that first week?
9