A gate agent in Denver told me my squawk write-up was useless, and she was right

Terry Rodriguez · 2026-09-19T07:45:07.014192+00:00

I was waiting to jumpseat home out of Denver a couple weeks ago and got talking to a gate agent about a write-up I'd just signed off on. She said the pilots she deals with every day complain about squawks like "autopilot inop, ops checks good" because it tells them nothing about what they'll actually see in the air. I laughed it off at first, but then I looked at my own log entries from that week and half of them said stuff like "capt sel, ops ck good" with no mention of what the crew saw, which mode, or what the fault codes showed. A pilot behind her jumped in and said the difference between a write-up that helps and one that doesn't is about 20 extra seconds of typing. So now I've started writing the symptom first, like "CAPT FD kicks off about 5 min after eng start, FMA shows CMD then reverts to FD only, A1 and A2 both flagged on BITE readout." Has anyone else changed how they word their squawks after feedback from the flight deck side?

Discusd

Loading…

A gate agent in Denver told me my squawk write-up was useless, and she was right | Avionics Technicians - Discusd