Just left a small repair shop in Tulsa and noticed nobody was checking their crimp tool calibration dates

If your DMC tool is even six months past cert and you're still using it on flight control harnesses, that's a grounding event waiting to happen, has anyone else walked into a shop that just doesn't seem to care about crimp pull tests?

2 comments

2 Comments

emery8791mo ago

Oh sure, because who really needs a reliable connection when you're just, you know, steering a multi-million dollar aircraft through the sky. I bet their calibration sticker is just a suggestion, like a "best by" date on a bag of chips. Probably still using the same crimp tool that survived a drop off the workbench in 1987. But hey, at least the coffee in the break room is fresh, right?

charles9191mo ago

Read something the other day in a aviation safety report that basically said half the time when a plane has a electrical glitch it traces back to a connector that wasn't properly crimped or checked. And @emery879 is spot on about that old crimp tool thing. I remember a buddy of mine who used to work on 737s told me they had a bench vise from like 1985 that they used for everything even though it was way out of spec. The thing is these connections are literally the backbone of the whole control system. A loose pin in a connector at 35000 feet can cause a lot more than just a dropped call. But yeah that break room coffee comment hit close to home I bet that pot is older than my first car.