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Had a Collins radio fail on me mid-flight last Tuesday
I was troubleshooting a comm issue on a King Air in Bakersfield and the Collins VHF-22 just stopped transmitting entirely. Turned out to be a corroded pin in the backplane connector, not the radio itself. Has anyone else found corrosion in those older Collins trays causing intermittent failures?
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michaelcoleman1d ago
Corroded pin in a Collins tray? Classic, right up there with the "loose doorknob" analogy @blair_butler47 mentioned. I had a similar thing on a Cessna 441 last year - spent two hours swapping radios before I found the tray itself had a pin that looked like it'd been sitting in a salt marsh for a decade. Sure, the radio looked fine, but the tray was basically a passive-aggressive failure waiting to happen.
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That "corroded pin" thing is a CLASSIC example of how small details cause big failures. It reminds me of how people ignore a loose doorknob until it jams completely, when tightening one screw would have fixed it. We always look for the obvious failure instead of the actual root cause.
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