Originally Posted by
LarryJ
I mean exactly what I said. Few, if any, of the incidents are investigated further.
As a pilot, I would say that more than half of the avionics write ups that I see in the aircraft logbooks are not reproducible by the mechanics and are subsequently written up multiple times before the mechanics are able to get it fixed. Does that mean that the three, four, etc., previous anomalies were the pilot's imagination? No, it means that these things are unpredictable and very difficult to reproduce.
Yet they continue to occur, again, and again, and again. From that you conclude that they do not exist.
The only risk of using a cell phone during maintenance work is that an otherwise perfectly good airplane will fail a diagnostic test and the mechanics will waste time trying to find the non-existent problem.
Ah, that's the key to why the airplanes aren't crashing. We don't rely on the equipment working properly, we expect it to fail so that we are prepared on the relatively rare occasions that it does.
Re-read what I wrote on risk-management.
One successful test only shows that everything was working correctly on that airplane, on that flight. One test doesn't tell you anything about what can happen when things aren't working perfectly. If a successful test ensured perfect performance then there would never be any write-ups. Everything always works fine--until it doesn't.
Live in the dream world if you must, but your assumptions are using faulty logic. Not unlike many of the pilots I know, you know just enough to make bad assumptions. When it comes to how the systems work in detail the maintenance folks actually do know better. You might be good in a pinch, but you do not see the same level of detail or the testing involved. There are maintenance display pages that you don't look at, and for good reason, you don't have the documents to help you interpret their meaning. There are many well known and well documented nuisance messages that will pop up on your displays that the maintenance manual is aware of, and, as known nuisance messages, are cleared without action. You may feel this is a repeated problem, but it is a repeated write up from pilots who do not know the real issues. Eventually the pilots stop writing it up because they are taught about the nuisance message from the last mechanic who signed it off.
Many pilots are very well trained bus drivers, but please don;t claim to be the expert in the details of each system. You know how to fly, not fix or maintain these systems and they are more complicated at the maintenance level than you, as a pilot, will ever know or need to know.