Warning: That guy who said 'it's just a connector' cost me 4 hours last Friday

I was working on a Cessna 172 in Tampa and this younger tech kept insisting the cannon plug was fine without checking the pins. After I finally made him look with a magnifying glass, we found two bent pins that would have failed the flight check. Has anyone else run into techs who skip the basic visual inspection?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sarah5d ago

Oh man, that reminds me of a time I was helping a buddy swap out a starter on an old Cherokee. He was so convinced the battery was dead we didn't even check the wiring. Turns out the ground cable was so corroded it basically fell apart when I touched it. 4 hours of head scratching for something a quick visual would have caught in 30 seconds. I swear sometimes the most obvious stuff gets skipped because everyone's in a hurry.

wyatt_chen865d agoTop Commenter

Man I read this article about how most car problems are actually just bad connections or loose wires, not the actual part failing. It said something like 80% of starters that get replaced don't even need it, the issue is just corrosion or a bad ground. Your story fits right in with that. Reminds me of a video I saw where a guy chased a misfire for two days and it turned out to be a cracked ground strap under the intake nobody ever looked at. Sometimes you just gotta slow down and check the cheap stuff first.