More maintinance frustrations....

[Austintatious]

3 hours ago, 1980Mooney said:

I think you missed my point.  You have the ideal situation.  You have a partner/owner/pilot located near the shop that did the Annual. You have no need to "stay 2 weeks in timucktoo".  Your partner can put his eyes, hands, ears on the plane, work and the A&P/mechanics as frequently as need be or as often as you wish/direct.  Your partner can visit regularly to check progress on your punch list of squawks (and remind them if they got missed well before the plane was signed off).  You said this shop has a good reputation (not "fly by night").  Sometimes people just need some reminding and nudging especially if they are completely loaded up with work.

It sort of sounds like you are completely "hands on" and your partner is completely "hands off".

Yes... bingo...  It would be better if the shop was near me.

 

[Austintatious]

Haha... I Could write a book....

My company G650 has been in the shop at Gulf stream undergoing yearly maintenance.  I go to pick it up and like a good little pilot, I do a thorough pre-flight.  First catch is that whoever reinstalled the Radar altimeter decided to put blobs of fairing compound or whatever they put over the fasteners but never shaved them flush like they are supposed to be before painting over the blobs.... Other antennas (all were removed as part of the work) had big globs of painted pookey all around them as well. No attention to detail.

Then as I do the interior portion of the preflight, I find the brakes are acting up... turns out, despite opening up the brake system, they never bothered to bleed the brakes and the system was quite full of air...   The only clue was when I charged the accumulator, the pressure stopped rising and even fell a few hundred PSI... It is only because I was paying really close attention to everything that it was even discovered.

THEN on top of that... literally a few days later, the line workers backed a Falcons Elevator into our winglet!!!  This is insane, but somehow, all they did was scuff the paint on the TE of our winglet.   The falcon looked worse off, but still possibly just a paint ding, They had not examined it yet when I was told. ( I was no where near that event!)

I have been thinking a lot about this stuff lately, probably because of my annual and me revisiting this thread... 

I know there are good mechanics/shops out there... In fact, I believe most of them are probably actually very good.  I think the issue has got to be that they just don't really care to give the attention to detail.  The focus is on buttoning up the job and going on to the next one to make the money.  And I get that.  Paying attention to detail takes time... which means you have to charge the customer more... And most of the time slapping it altogether quickly probably works out... if only 1 out of 10 times you have to double back to work on something again because it got done improperly  then you are ahead of the game.  And for that to happen, the mistake has to be bad enough to be blatantly obvious, OR the pilot/owner has to be paying really close attention if it isn't.

 I am still left wondering... Is this chain of issues my fault for not being involved enough?  Is it just a string of bad luck?  Or is it that these sort of mistakes happen often but simply go unnoticed by most people?  Or is it some combination of all of the above?

 

[EricJ]

13 minutes ago, Austintatious said:

 I am still left wondering... Is this chain of issues my fault for not being involved enough?  Is it just a string of bad luck?  Or is it that these sort of mistakes happen often but simply go unnoticed by most people?  Or is it some combination of all of the above?

The same stories happen with cars and boats and anything mechanical big enough that there are service shops for it.    Some are better than others.

The guy that does the maintenance on the airplanes for our CAP wing is really, really good.   Our wing flies a ton, so we're constantly shuttling airplanes down there and back for 100 hour inspections, engine overhauls, etc..   I always do an extended preflight when picking one up after major maintenance, like what you described, and everything is always perfect.   I'm worried I'll get complacent because there's never even a tiny issue.   

So there's always both ends of the spectrum, which I think is to be expected.   I got my A&P partly because I was so disappointed with my panel overhaul done at a major avionics shop.   I think the middle, fat part of the statistical distribution includes results with a fair number of flaws.   The really good stuff is out on the rare end of the distribution.  So it's...rare. 

[Barneyw]

3 hours ago, Austintatious said:

Haha... I Could write a book....

My company G650 has been in the shop at Gulf stream undergoing yearly maintenance.  I go to pick it up and like a good little pilot, I do a thorough pre-flight.  First catch is that whoever reinstalled the Radar altimeter decided to put blobs of fairing compound or whatever they put over the fasteners but never shaved them flush like they are supposed to be before painting over the blobs.... Other antennas (all were removed as part of the work) had big globs of painted pookey all around them as well. No attention to detail.

Then as I do the interior portion of the preflight, I find the brakes are acting up... turns out, despite opening up the brake system, they never bothered to bleed the brakes and the system was quite full of air...   The only clue was when I charged the accumulator, the pressure stopped rising and even fell a few hundred PSI... It is only because I was paying really close attention to everything that it was even discovered.

THEN on top of that... literally a few days later, the line workers backed a Falcons Elevator into our winglet!!!  This is insane, but somehow, all they did was scuff the paint on the TE of our winglet.   The falcon looked worse off, but still possibly just a paint ding, They had not examined it yet when I was told. ( I was no where near that event!)

I have been thinking a lot about this stuff lately, probably because of my annual and me revisiting this thread... 

I know there are good mechanics/shops out there... In fact, I believe most of them are probably actually very good.  I think the issue has got to be that they just don't really care to give the attention to detail.  The focus is on buttoning up the job and going on to the next one to make the money.  And I get that.  Paying attention to detail takes time... which means you have to charge the customer more... And most of the time slapping it altogether quickly probably works out... if only 1 out of 10 times you have to double back to work on something again because it got done improperly  then you are ahead of the game.  And for that to happen, the mistake has to be bad enough to be blatantly obvious, OR the pilot/owner has to be paying really close attention if it isn't.

 I am still left wondering... Is this chain of issues my fault for not being involved enough?  Is it just a string of bad luck?  Or is it that these sort of mistakes happen often but simply go unnoticed by most people?  Or is it some combination of all of the above?

 

I have a maintenance background albeit a military one but even then it was all about more speed and less haste, measure twice cut once and get the job done right the first time. This smacks of carelessness, pressure from above and lack of training. 

I presume in their haste to get the job finished and clear hangar space that all the snags you found were fixed on their dime not yours - something to do with false economies etc.

Having said that I think their is a general malaise in the system on a global scale more kids interested in becoming influencers or Tour of Duty champions rather than getting a real job. I would imagine, just like here in Oz, the average age of an experienced mechanic is increasing at an alarming rate.  Cheers

[PT20J]

I once preflighted a Schweizer 300 after it came out of maintenance and found all three pitch links unsafetied. I don't know what the answer is other than to be as hands on with maintenance as possible. 

[Fly Boomer]

18 hours ago, Austintatious said:

I am still left wondering... Is this chain of issues my fault for not being involved enough?  Is it just a string of bad luck?  Or is it that these sort of mistakes happen often but simply go unnoticed by most people?  Or is it some combination of all of the above?

It's almost never attributable to just one thing.