Heard a junior guy say 'who even uses analog gauges anymore' and it got me thinking

I was grabbing coffee last Tuesday before pulling a panel on a King Air, and one of the younger techs was complaining about having to cross-check a mechanical altimeter. He said something like 'we should just rip all this old stuff out, it's dead weight.' And I mean, I get it, digital is faster and cleaner. But that analog gauge has been up there for 35 years and it still works fine. There's something about being able to see the needle move and feel the pitot-static system working that a screen just doesn't give you. Plus half the time when a digital readout goes haywire, you're chasing bad grounds for three days. My first shop had a '62 Beechcraft with nothing but steam gauges and that thing never lied to me once. Maybe it's just me getting old, but has anyone else had a digital system fail in a weird way that an analog gauge would have just kept working through?

2 comments

2 Comments

xena_fox396d ago

Man you're making this way bigger than it needs to be. Digital stuff fails sometimes, analog stuff fails sometimes. That's just how it goes. The whole debate about gauges feels like one of those things people get worked up over just to have something to argue about by the coffee machine. Your King Air panel isn't going to suddenly explode because someone made a joke about steam gauges. A shop joke about ripping stuff out is just that a joke. Nobody's actually going to pull a certified instrument on a live plane because a junior tech made a comment. Let the kid have his opinion and move on.

gavinw456d ago

I see it a bit different though @xena_fox39. The way people talk about stuff in the shop does matter, even if it's just jokes. When a junior tech hears "steam gauges are junk" enough times, it plants a seed that analog stuff isn't worth respecting. That mindset can lead to sloppy work down the line, like not checking a mechanical altimeter's static leak because "it's old anyway." And yeah, nobody is ripping out a certified instrument over coffee talk, but the constant disrespect for tried and true systems bugs me. I've seen too many perfectly good analog instruments get treated like trash because of that attitude. Why not just teach the kid what each system does best instead of letting the jokes shape his opinion?