Vent: I argued with a pilot about a faulty transponder for a solid hour in Denver

This happened last month at a regional airport in Colorado. A pilot was sure his transponder was giving bad altitude data, and I was just as sure it was a simple antenna issue based on the ground test. We went back and forth, him pointing at the cockpit display, me pointing at my test gear. He finally said, 'Look, I'm not telling you how to fix it, I'm telling you what it's doing up there.' That stuck with me. I was so focused on proving my ground diagnosis right that I wasn't listening to the actual in-flight symptom. I re-ran the tests with his specific complaint in mind and found an intermittent fault in the encoder wiring that only showed up under certain pressure changes. Ever since then, I make a point to ask pilots to describe the problem in their own words first, even if I think I already know the answer. Has anyone else had a case where the pilot's description totally changed how you approached a fix?

3 comments

3 Comments

bettywilson3mo ago

Shut up and let them talk first" sounds nice, but sometimes pilots just don't have the right words for the tech. I've seen guys waste time chasing vague descriptions when a quick diagnostic check would have found the real issue right away. @adams.vera got lucky that time, but relying on that every time is a gamble.

adams.vera3mo ago

Used to be the same way, always jumping to the fix. Had a guy with a persistent autopilot pitch trim issue I was ready to condemn the whole servo. He kept saying it felt like a slow drift, not a step. Made me recheck the control cable tension, and sure enough, it was just out of spec. His simple description saved us a huge parts swap. Now I shut up and let them talk first. Their words are the best tool in the box.

burns.fiona1mo ago

Heard a story from my buddy Dave who works at a regional carrier up north. He used to be just like @adams.vera described, always wanting to rip into the black boxes first. Had a captain come in with a weird intermittent avionics glitch, nothing in the logs, but Dave actually sat there and let him describe every bump and flicker for twenty minutes. Turned out the pilot kept his iPad charger plugged into a specific outlet that was messing with the radio altimeter shielding. Dave never would have caught that with a diagnostic check alone. Guess sometimes the best test equipment is a decent chair and an open ear.