One shift last month nearly made me quit over a simple cotter pin

I work line maintenance at a small regional outfit near Phoenix. Last month we had a bird strike on a CRJ and the pilot reported a vibration. I pulled the engine cowling and found the real issue, a loose cotter pin on the main gear linkage that had been rubbing for weeks. The bird was a distraction, the pin was the actual danger. Took me six hours to track it because the first two mechanics before me only checked the obvious damage. The paperwork said the pin was inspected 48 hours prior and signed off. I showed the lead and he just shrugged, said 'that's what happens when you trust the stamp over your fingers.' That same week we had two more aircraft with similar wear patterns. I spent Saturday rechecking every gear pin on the fleet, found one more that was half out. Nobody thanked me for it, but I couldn't sleep knowing that bird strike almost masked a landing gear failure. Has anyone else caught a secondary fault like this that would have been missed if the first red flag was different?

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spencerr8715d ago

Honest answer nobody likes hearing: the sign off system is only as good as the guy holding the pen that day, and a stamp doesn't feel slop or drag with a flashlight. What gets me about your story is the bird strike part. A strike gives everyone a nice neat box to check, so the real problem gets buried under "cause found" and nobody digs past it. That's how the same wear keeps flying for weeks. The lead's shrug was him telling you the truth about that shop without saying it out loud. You did the right thing eating your Saturday, but a place that needs one guy to recheck the whole fleet on his own time has a bigger problem than any pin.

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