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Can we talk about what the Greyhound driver told me about our ADS-B install?
Last Tuesday I was sitting at the gate in Louisville waiting on a flight, and the guy next to me turned out to be a retired bus driver. We got to talking and he asked what I do, so I said avionics. He said something I keep chewing on: "Y'all are the only ones who can see the whole picture and you still let the pilots think they're in charge." That hit different because two days before I had a squawk on a King Air where the transponder was reporting wrong altitude to ATC and the pilot swore up and down it was a GPS issue. I pulled the tray, checked the encoder wiring, and found a chafed pin on the connector that only showed up when the cabin heated past 90 degrees on the ramp. Took me about 40 minutes with a heat gun and a multimeter to prove it. His point was that we catch stuff nobody else even knows to look for, and most of the time nobody says thanks. So now I'm wondering, how many of you have had a pilot or a passenger say something offhand that actually made you feel better about this job?
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wesleyburns5d ago
That chafed pin story is wild because it proves his point in a way most people never see. A connector that only acts up past 90 degrees on the ramp? No pilot on earth is going to catch that on a preflight walkaround, and honestly ATC just sees a wrong number pop up on their screen and assumes the plane is broken, not that it is a wiring gremlin. So here is my question for you, when you finally showed that King Air pilot the bad pin, did he actually admit he was wrong or did he just shrug it off and walk? Because in my experience the answer to that tells you way more about a guy than the squawk ever does.
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