Overheard a veteran tech say something at PDX that stuck with me

I was working a line in Portland last week and heard this old timer tell a new guy that most avionics failures are just bad connections, not bad boxes. He said he's fixed more planes with a can of contact cleaner than with a test set. How do you guys decide when to chase a wire versus just swapping a LRU?

2 comments

2 Comments

kevin_schmidt9714d ago

That line about contact cleaner vs test sets hits me hard. I worked with a guy like that at my first hangar job, he'd spend 15 minutes wiggling wires before even looking at a schematic. Saved us from swapping a perfectly good LRU on a 737 three times in one week, just loose pins in the backshell. Chasing wires takes patience though, I'll admit I've thrown parts at problems when the pressure's on. But those old timers are right, 90% of the time it's corrosion or a bent pin, not the box itself.

allen.cole14d ago

Funny how that same logic plays out everywhere, not just in a hangar. My buddy's a mechanic and he'll spend an hour checking fuses and grounds before he even thinks about pulling a starter. Meanwhile I've got a neighbor who replaced his whole lawnmower carburetor because it wouldn't start, turned out the spark plug wire was just loose. People always want to swap the big expensive thing first because it feels like you're doing something. But the simple stuff, the connections, the little bits of corrosion, that's where almost every problem actually lives. Just takes a minute to look before you start throwing money at it.