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Saw a wire chafe turn into smoke on a King Air in Wichita, now I check the whole run
Working a ramp checks gig at a shop near Wichita about 8 months back, I watched a King Air 200 come in for a routine inspection. Another tech had signed off the avionics bay the day before and only looked at the connectors, not the runs behind the panel. While we were doing a power up, I smelled something hot and saw a thin strand of smoke curl off a bundle that had been rubbing on a rib for who knows how long. We shut it down and found the insulation worn down to bare wire on three leads, all because the clamp was loose and nobody traced the full run. If that had gone up in flight instead of on the ground, that crew would have had a real bad day. Now I pull every bundle back as far as I can reach, even if it means an extra 20 minutes on the floor. Any of you got a shortcut for checking runs you can barely see behind a rack?
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the_brian29d ago
Learned the hard way that the thing you can't see is always the thing that bites you. Same deal with the gutters on my own house last spring, water looked fine from the ground but the whole run behind the fascia was rotted out because I never checked past the first elbow. Ten dollar flashlight and a phone camera on a stick saved me a four thousand dollar repair, and it's the same trick for those runs behind a rack. Tape a cheap borescope to a coat hanger, feed it back there, and take a video you can scroll through later instead of twisting your neck blind.
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