Vent: overheard a lead tech say avionics is just 'plug and play' now and I lost it

I was sitting in the break room last Tuesday at the MRO in Phoenix and this guy, been here maybe 8 months, says to another tech that our job is basically plug and play because everything is digital now. I wanted to ask him how many times he's had to chase a ground loop on a King Air or figure out why a G1000 keeps rebooting at FL250. We still have to know signal flow, power distribution, and how to solder a cannon plug in a tight spot. He's never even wired a 406 ELT from scratch. Has anyone else had to deal with new techs acting like our troubleshooting is just swapping boxes?

2 comments

2 Comments

lisa_murray7d ago

You ever hear about my buddy Mike at the regional shop in Tucson? He spent three hours on a Cessna 172 chasing a bad ground on the audio panel, and this fresh-out-of-school kid walks by and says "why not just replace the whole panel?" Mike just pointed at his multimeter and said "that's like swapping your whole car because the radio won't turn on." The kid just walked off. Pricks like that make the rest of us look bad, you know?

evan1517d ago

Does this guy even know what a pinout chart is? I feel you, man. I've had brand new techs act like swapping a whole box is fixing it, but they never stop to think about why that one pin is reading zero volts after a hard landing. Chasing down a ground loop or a noisy signal on a old-school bus still takes real skill, not just plugging in a new part. And forget about explaining soldering a cannon plug to someone who thinks everything is just modular. It's frustrating when people don't get that the troubleshooting is still the same brain work, just with different boxes. Solidarity from a guy who's spent too many hours in a hot hangar tracing wires.