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Remember when test flights meant a clipboard and a pencil?
Back in 2001 at the ramp in Tucson, I used to track every squawk on paper, hand written notes with time stamps and little diagrams for wire runs. We had a rolling cart with binders for each aircraft, and if you lost the page, you basically re-flew the whole test to catch what was missed. Now I just pull up the laptop in the cockpit, tap the fault code, and the log updates itself in real time. The shift happened around 2010 when our shop went digital with the data buses, and honestly, my handwriting was so bad that the scanner errors were worse than my old chicken scratches. But there is something about physically flipping through those pages that made you double check the work, you know? Do any of you old timers still keep a paper log for backup, or am I the only one who trusts the screens fully?
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claire_ramirez1mo ago
Oh man, a buddy of mine out at a shop in Wichita had the exact opposite problem. He kept both for like five years, paper plus the laptop, and one day the paper log saved his whole crew. The data bus glitched and wiped out a day of fault codes, but he had every squawk written down with times, so they rebuilt the whole test from his notebook. He said after that the younger guys stopped making fun of his binder. I keep a small notepad in my bag now, idk, feels dumb sometimes but you never know.
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