Chat with a fuel truck driver at PDX flipped my thinking on avionics troubleshooting

I was waiting for a fuel truck at Portland International last Tuesday and this old driver starts telling me how he figures out which planes have bad gauges just by listening to the pump pitch. I laughed it off but then he showed me three specific aircraft that I had written up for fuel indicator issues. Made me realize I spend too much time ripping apart panels when I could be watching for patterns in the ground support behavior. Has anyone else ever gotten a useful tip from non-avionics ramp crew?

2 comments

2 Comments

emma728d ago

That bit about the pump pitch really got me thinking. I had a similar thing happen with a baggage handler at SeaTac once. He told me he could tell which 737s had sticky cargo door latches just by the sound they made when the loader hit the door frame. Turned out he was spot on about three planes I'd been chasing issues on for weeks. Now I pay way more attention to what the ramp guys say, they see patterns we miss inside the plane.

zarap147d ago

Not trying to be difficult here but I actually take the opposite view. @emma72 that baggage handler story is interesting but I've had ramp guys waste my time with bad hunches way more often than theyve actually helped. The fuel truck driver got lucky or he knows that one specific fleet and that's it. Most of the time they don't understand the engineering behind the systems so they just guess and if you chase every tip from a baggage handler or a fueler youll be knee deep in false leads. I'd rather trust my test equipment and the book than some sound a guy heard on the ramp.