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The new guy at our hangar asked me why I still ring out every connector by hand, and I didn't have a good answer
I was showing a fresh A&P hire around our bay at the airfield in Wichita last week when he watched me spend 20 minutes ringing out a cannon plug with a Fluke meter instead of just trusting the automated continuity test on our bench setup. He asked, real polite, why I'd burn the time when the machine does it in 30 seconds. I started to say something about the old days and then stopped, because honestly the machine is faster and it's been right every time. But here's the thing, about 6 months back we had an intermittent fault on a King Air that three different automated checks passed clean, and it turned out to be a pin that was backing out just enough to lose contact under vibration. I found it by wiggling every wire by hand, which is exactly the kind of thing the box can't do. So now I'm stuck in this weird spot where I believe in the newer test gear but I still don't fully trust it. The kid made a good point though, that maybe the answer isn't hand testing everything, it's knowing which spots on which airframes need the hands-on look. How do you all split up what you trust the box to catch versus what you still check yourself?
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simon7179d ago
The box only knows what it was told to look for, so it will never catch a failure mode the engineer who wrote the test didn't think of. Your King Air pin backing out under vibration is a perfect example, because no bench check runs the thing hot, cold, and shaking at the same time. Maybe the real split is not hands versus machine, it is trusting the box on known failure modes and saving your hands for the stuff nobody's written a test for yet.
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