Hot take: I was wrong about the 'always check the cannon plug first' advice

For years, my lead at the MRO in Tulsa would say, 'It's always the cannon plug, kid.' I was chasing a comms fault on a Citation last month, a real head scratcher with intermittent audio dropouts. I spent half a day pulling and inspecting every D-sub in the audio panel path because of that advice, cleaning pins that looked fine. The actual fault was a corroded ground stud behind the main instrument panel, a spot I didn't even look at until I was forced to start over. That single piece of well-meaning but absolute advice cost me a bunch of time. It made me lazy, you know? I just defaulted to it instead of following the manual's isolation steps from the start. Has anyone else had a piece of shop 'wisdom' bite them like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

blairj5515d ago

Doubt it's that deep. Sometimes the old heads are right, sometimes they're wrong, you just got unlucky.

the_cora15d ago

Read a story once about a guy who spent a week swapping out a flight control computer on a regional jet for a trim issue. The whole shop swore it was the classic failure mode for that plane. Turned out a bird's nest had jammed the actual trim screw jack in the tail. Those old sayings become shortcuts, and shortcuts make you blind to the simple stuff. Your story about the ground stud hits that same nerve. It feels like we trust the old heads more than the book sometimes, even when the book is literally the written path to follow. How do you break that habit once you see it happen?