Old timer told me to trust the prints over my eyes... he was right

I was chasing a ghost on a Garmin G1000 install last Tuesday. The wiring looked perfect to me, no shorts, no breaks. A guy named Frank with 30 years in the hangar said 'kid, your eyes are lying, go back to the schematic.' I spent 10 minutes comparing every pin to the diagram and found I had swapped pins 22 and 23 on the connector. Fixed it in 2 minutes after that. Has anyone else had a senior tech call them out on something they were sure was right?

2 comments

2 Comments

jordanm199h ago

Nah, I gotta disagree a little here. Trusting the prints is good advice but Ive had schematics that were dead wrong, like a 1990s Cessna that had a misprinted pinout in the actual manual. Ended up spending 3 hours chasing a phantom issue until I finally trusted my own eyes and a multimeter to find the factory had wired it opposite to the diagram. Sometimes the old timers are right, but sometimes the prints are just outdated or wrong too.

terry15h ago

Fair enough but a 90s Cessna isn't really an old timer's plane, that's more like the era when they started getting sloppy with the wiring diagrams.