That one avionics tech who refused to call a short a short

Back in 2013 at a small MRO in Fort Worth, we had this older avionics guy, Pete. I was chasing an intermittent nav light fault on a King Air, swapped the bulb, checked the connector, even replaced the switch. Pete walked over, didn't say a word, grabbed a piece of safety wire and a test light, and started probing the harness about 2 feet back from where I was looking. Found a chafed wire hidden under a clamp that only grounded out when the plane sat in a specific attitude. He just looked at me and said, 'You fixed the symptom twice. Now go find the cause.' That stuck with me more than any manual ever did. Anybody else had a senior tech drop a line like that on you, and you still use it today?

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jake_mason303d ago

That story about Pete hits hard because it points out the difference between fixing and troubleshooting. Most guys I worked with, they would have called it a win after swapping the switch the second time, then walked away. But Pete knew the real fault was still in the harness, just waiting to show up again at the worst possible moment. My question is, how long did it take you to stop treating the symptom first and start looking for the root cause right away? I mean, did you have to get burned a few more times before you finally listened to that lesson, or did it just click in your head after that?