AW1Steve
Posts: 14507
Joined: 3/10/2007
From: Mordor Illlinois
Status: offline
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ORIGINAL: Dixie
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ORIGINAL: AW1Steve
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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy
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ORIGINAL: USS America
No flying means they are not breaking anything, either. 
I imagine that Steve takes that as a personal challenge! 
I have never, ever, broken ANYTHING on an airplane. But on NUMEROUS times I've flown on planes that have never been fixed right. The Maintainers would always write "cannot duplicate gripe on ground". To which I could only add "Then come up here and try it you lazy Bast@rd!. Still broken".
I have had numerous faults where the fault was actually the normal functioning of the aircraft. And plenty where the fault was aircrew error. And a few where the fault was known but we couldn't reproduce it on the ground. Or the ever popular loose article because the aircrew have dropped something. Who drops a ****ing orange behind the rudder pedals?! Or when they say they've lost 20p and all you can find is 5p, because they dropped four 5p coins.   Anyone who flies or works around aircraft should be well versed in the dangers of FOD and loose articles.
I've had aircrew push on with a mission after they lost the oil pressure on climb out from base and left an engine windmilling with no oil for five hours.
I've had to deal with aircrew complaining that the engine RPM is fluctuating when they had a big crosswind blowing across the engine intake.
Or making the engine go BANG because they did something wrong.
Or cooked the generator and CSDU because they 'thought they could fix it'.
Or the AAR pod trailed slower than usual. How are we meant to replicate that problem when we don't have 500kts of airflow blowing across our aircraft? And there's no defined speed for the thing to trail at. We later found out that they'd been in a turn when they trailed the damn thing so the airflow was less than usual 
I've known them to lie about what they were doing when things broke. I've been called out at 4am to fix a problem that is a result of the aircraft working as designed.
I've had aircrew dump over a ton of fuel on the dispersal after doing the exact thing I told them NOT to do 10 minutes earlier.
A lot of the snags depend on the aircrew, some are sensible and will listen to the groundcrews. Some are quite clearly experts in everything and know more than the guys who are actually experts at fixing things. In my experience a surprising amount of problems are a direct result of a failure somewhere in the seat to stick interface
It might make sense to say that the pilots are paid to know how their aeroplane works. Technicians (or engineers or whatever they're called in your experience) are expected to know why the aeroplane works. And how to make her work again from a set of symptoms that may or may not be linked or may not even be real.
I can't comment on Steve's black boxes, because that's avionics equipment (in the RAF at least) and I'm mechanical systems. Also because it's nothing I wouldn't say about avionics technicians anyway Anywar, rant over. This wasn't targeted at Steve either, because AFAIK he was basically in the same category as the stewards, just a glorified passenger 
EDIT: There are good aircrew out there as well, it's just that the bad ones stick in the mind more.
Yeah. Glorified passanger. I really whish you could experince "Being just a passenger" when the RADAR crapps out (having been written up 17 times before for the same fault) in the middle of a line of thunderstorms , or an Icelandic ice storm.
No I'm not going off on maintainers Martin. Some of them are also aircrew (fight engineers, inflight technicians and 2nd mechanics). And I've spent too many times passing wrenches to them when we were broken down in some God forsaken place, with little or no support.
And yes, I've seen many things that fell into places on an airplane that they had no reason for being. Oranges, yes, as well as pens, books and lord knows what else....although the weirdest thing I ever had to remove from near a rudder pedal was an extremely angry and scared Persian cat , who's already sliced up the co-pilots legs.  (That's another sea story.......).
But as long as there have been aircrew and maintainers , there have been spats between them , and probably always will be.
By the way Dixie. I HAVE BEEN a steward. So trust me, I know the difference.
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RE: THE THREAD!!! - 
On two occassions I taped a five dollar bill to the bottom of the box. Yes, it would still be there when I checked. 
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