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swa911, I believe that you started the little pissing contest with your swipe toward fingpilot for disagreeing with your diagnosis. How dare he (fing pilot). And zefsuper911, your comment about pilots being GODS was also direct and to the point in your disdain toward us.
So here's my response:
My comment about "could not duplicate" stands. I'll give an example. Since December 12th, one of our airplanes has had it's TCAS written up FIVE times by five different pilots, including me. Every single time the mechanics found nothing wrong with the TCAS and returned it to service. Finally, my first officer noted during his preflight inspection that the TCAS antenna was completely chopped in half but was being held together by the protective leading edge tape. He called me down to look at it and sure enough, the only thing holding the lower portion of the TCAS antenna was indeed the tape. Hmm. It didn't take a genius to guess what was causing the TCAS faults, so I called Maintenance over to take a look at the antenna and casually mentioned that this airplane had had it's TCAS system written up five times in the past six days and that this might have been causing the problem. They agreed and pulled the aircraft from service while awaiting a new antenna. So why didn't maintenance catch this obvious break of the antenna during their previous five diagnosis of the system?
The point of this is that many times maintenance seems to want to take the easy way out and do a quick, simple diagnosis and if they don't find the problem quickly they just return the aircraft to service when all they would need to do is perform a THOROUGH diagnosis (like checking the antenna on a system that requires one to work properly and keeps failing over and over again). Yes, many pilots need to be more concise with their write-ups but, c'mon man, if pilots ding something over and over again while the aircraft is in flight but you can't duplicate it on the ground (yes, we know that many problems can not be duplicated on the ground, zefsuper), then either do a more thorough diagnosis, or yes, start replacing parts, starting with the most likely first. Don't just do nothing over and over again just because you couldn't figure out was was wrong and therefore the pilots must have been dreaming about the failure. Either that, or take it out on a test flight and see for yourself if the fault can't be duplicated on the ground.
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