AOPA Pilot Magazine - August 2016 - 112

P&E

112 | 

SAVVY MAINTENANCE

diagnosis is correct? Pretty good, actually,
because his intuition is based on decades
of accumulated wisdom obtained through
troubleshooting such issues hundreds or
thousands of times.
Now let's replay this scenario, but
this time imagine that the mechanic is a
22-year-old who just graduated from A&P
school. How reliable do you suppose his
intuitive diagnosis is? Probably not very.
He might be smart as a whip (and hopefully is), but this newbie mechanic is
most likely going to have to diagnose your
engine issue the hard way-analytically-
until he has enough experience under his
belt that his intuition is based on wisdom.
The problem is that we aircraft owners
never wind up gaining much experience
choosing or vetting A&Ps, overhaul shops,
medical examiners, brokers, and insurance agents. Most likely, we only make
such choices a relative handful of times in
the entire course of our aviation careers.
It's not surprising, then, that our instincts

and gut feelings about who is trustworthy
are often far from the mark. We're all newbies, after all.
Therefore, we need to be extremely
wary of our first impressions of such
folks. Much like that young A&P, we need
to choose whom to trust the hard way-
analytically. This usually means doing
background checks, evaluating résumés,
obtaining references, and all the other
sorts of due diligence that we would do if,
say, we were hiring a key employee or making a loan.
What does this mean? What exactly
are we supposed to be looking for, anyway?
PREREQUISITES AND MOTIVATIONS

Let's start with the obvious: qualifications
and experience. Those are certainly nobrainer prerequisites for any expert on
whom we can rely. But what kind of qualifications and experience are we looking for?
Suppose you've just moved to a new
home airport and you're looking for a

trustworthy mechanic to work on your
Cessna T210. You locate a shop on the field
owned and operated by an A&P/IA, and
you notice that his graduation certificate
from Spartan School of Aeronautics (arguably the world's largest A&P school) is
dated more than 25 years ago. You meet the
shop owner and notice an inviting smile
bookended by symmetrical gray around
the temples of his brown hair. Clearly this
fellow has been wrenching on airplanes for
a long time. Surely he has the qualifications
and experience to be trustworthy to work
on your airplane, right?
Not so fast. Maybe this mechanic spent
most of the last 25 years working for the
airlines or in a Citation Service Center,
and really doesn't have much of a clue
when it comes to your Continental TSIO520. Or maybe he spent that time working
at a Beechcraft specialty shop in Florida
and knows Bonanzas and Barons like the
back of his hand, but has very little experience with turbocharging. It might well be

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - August 2016
