Snagging the Carpet

Step Two of the nine steps of being able to defer something is ensuring it can actually be deferred. If it's a stain on the carpet, it can be deferred.  But remember than in order to defer something, it first needs to be reported as a defect. In Canada, that is referred to as "snagging." Like "I snagged the landing light." And the result is a snag. "Talk to maintenance about the wording before you put the snag in the journey log." 
Americans call them squawks. And they don't have a journey log, so they write them on a squawk sheet. Americans can tell me whether the squawk sheet is a legal document or not. Those last two sentences were an aside so you could understand me when I said I have never in my life seen a pilot snag a stain on a carpet. Airplane carpets just get dirtier and dirtier until someone tears them out and replaces them. I've done that.

And it's bed time so I'll get to step two later.

More Than Catharsis

So, after I blogged a few days ago, I scrolled down and read the previous blog entry, and then the one before that, and the one before that, and kind of got stuck there until it was time for bed.  I woke up this morning and read some more instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing. It's kind of fun reading about my adventures, and your comments thereupon. Maybe, I thought, I can come up with a way to blog about them without subjecting my company or clients to unnecessary scrutiny, and without taking the vast swathes of time I used to spend on this sort of thing. I know my former blog entries just looked like a horde of stream of thought typos, but my typo speed and thought speed are not measured in Mach.

Where should I start?  We have an airplane on the ground in another province right now ... and a call from the owner to see if we can fly it on one alternator to get it to maintenance. One can, of course, physically, fly an airplane in Day VFR (good weather, outside of clouds) with no electrical system at all, but there are various rules that can get complicated. The PRM (person at the company with ultimate responsibility for deciding whether an airplane is legally and safely flyable) earlier grounded the airplane for two issues, one of which has been fixed and the other of which is the unserviceable alternator.  There is some back and forth between me, the owner, and the PRM about whether the unserviceable alternator can be deferred. Deferral is a process where the repair of an unserviceable item that is not strictly required for safe flight can be rescheduled for up to 30 days.

It's a nine step procedure to defer an unserviceable item for our fleet. Step one is that something has to be actually and officially broken. The pilot has to write the defect in the journey log (a legal document that, for airplanes whose registration doesn't start with N, is maintained showing the where, when, and who of all flight segments).  You wouldn't believe how many times pilots defer an item that has not yet been logged as broken.  And quite a few times the item they think they need to defer works just fine once it is operated according to the instruction manual, or compared against the standard for the item. That's step one.

Also step one of my possible (no guarantees) return to blogging: I won't spend hours on one blog entry. I might get nine blog entries out of deferrals before I even hit the actual story. And maybe by then I will no longer be frustrated by this pilot.