Question about the value of old-school bench testing versus just swapping units

My buddy at the hangar in Dallas said 'a good tech fixes the box, a great tech fixes the plane' after I spent a whole afternoon chasing a phantom autopilot fault that was just a single corroded pin in a cannon plug.'

2 comments

2 Comments

kim.stella12d ago

Honestly, swapping units first is just smart business. Time is money, and you can't bill a customer for hours of chasing a tiny crack in a wire. A known-good unit from the shelf proves the box is bad in minutes. If the problem stays, then you dig deeper. That's not being lazy, it's being efficient. A lot of the time, the box really is the problem.

henry_hernandez12d ago

My friend had a similar thing happen with a nav radio. The shop kept sending the unit out for bench checks, it came back green every time. Took a real sharp mechanic to finally trace it back to a tiny crack in the coax cable shield behind the panel. Swapping boxes would have never fixed it.