Spent 8 hours chasing a ghost in a Garmin G1000 at our hangar in Boise

The autopilot kept pitching down intermittently, and I was sure it was a servo or a bad ADAHRS. Turns out a mouse had chewed through a single wire in the static line bundle, but only when the airframe flexed on the jacks would it lose contact. My lead just laughed and said 'check the simple stuff first, Henderson.' Anyone else ever lose a whole day to rodent damage?

3 comments

3 Comments

samjohnson5d ago

Absolutely, and it's crazy how those little problems can hide in plain sight. That whole "check the simple stuff" rule is the hardest one to actually follow when you're deep in the weeds on a complex system. You get so focused on the fancy black boxes that a chewed wire or a pile of nuts seems too obvious. Makes you wonder how many other weird, intermittent gremlins are just basic animal damage waiting to be found.

evan_burns951d ago

Right, @samjohnson, that "check the simple stuff" rule is a trap. Your brain just refuses to believe the answer could be that dumb. I've seen a guy replace three different sensors chasing a phantom voltage drop. The whole time it was just a single frayed wire, rubbed raw from a zip tie. You feel like a genius when you find it, but also a total idiot for the two hours you spent ignoring it.

jana_fox505d ago

Rodents are the real final bosses of aviation maintenance. Spent a whole afternoon once convinced we had a bad fuel transducer, and it was just a pack rat's nest of acorns in the wing root. The simple stuff always gets you.