Hot take: the cracked firewall on that Piper Warrior at KFTG was worse than I thought

Saw a guy patch a 4-inch crack with just aluminum tape and a rivet gun, and it made me wonder how many of these repairs actually get caught on annual inspections.

2 comments

2 Comments

hugo_coleman2815d ago

Brooks actually flagged a similar tape job on a 172 at my home field last spring during an annual. The tape was peeling around the edges and you could see corrosion starting where the crack was. The mechanic said he sees at least one firewall patch per month that looks like a quick field fix. Most of them hold for a while but the real test is when you pull the tape off and see if somebody actually prepped the metal or just slapped it on. I bet half of those tape fixes disappear during the first real oil leak or hard landing.

matthew70315d ago

Man, that's rough. It sucks knowing how many of those little "fixes" are just hiding bigger problems underneath.