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Hit my 2,000th squawk sign-off last Friday and felt weirdly old about it
I was going through my logbook Friday night at the kitchen table in Tucson and noticed the running total hit 2,000 squawks signed off. That number snuck up on me. When I started in 2009 we were still doing a lot of stuff with paper wiring diagrams and a multimeter, and now half my job is plugging a laptop into a box and watching fault codes scroll by. Some of those old birds I worked on at my first shop are already retired to the boneyard. I still remember chasing an intermittent in a pitot heat circuit for two days and finding a chafed wire behind a panel nobody had opened since the factory. These days the same fault pops up in ten minutes on a built in test, which is nice, but part of me misses knowing every inch of the harness by feel. What was your first real gremlin that took way longer than it should have?
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grant.parker14d ago
Congrats on 2,000, that number sneaking up on you says a lot about how long you have been at this. I get that weird old feeling, my first gremlin was an intermittent fuel gauge on an old 172 that only acted up when it rained. Turned out to be a pinhole in the tank sump gasket letting just enough moisture in to mess with the sender, took me three weekends and a lot of head scratching. Nobody had a tester for that back then either, it was just me, a meter, and pulling panels until I found it. Now I run a check and it tells me the whole story, which is faster but you lose that feeling of really knowing the plane.
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