Originally Posted by
Tomaski
Mostly a lurker, but I saw some discussion about the lack of detail to the write-ups by the Lion Air crew (the first one that didn’t crash), and I thought I would add my 2 cents as someone who has been there. It might have been very helpful and possibly saved all those lives if more information was included, but maybe not. I don’t know how Lion Air does it, but there are times when I talk to a mechanic about what I saw and then make an entry and there are times that I make the entry, leave the logbook in the aircraft, and go on to my next flight. This kind of malfunction strikes me as the types where a whole team of mechanics would have met the aircraft and the pilots would have thoroughly debriefed what they saw. In that case, they may have not actually written every detail down in the logbook because that just told the guy who is going to work on the plane. Been there done that. On a more concerning side, sometimes I’ve been told that if you write it up like this, then we have to do X, but if you write it up like this other way, then we have to do Y, where X is a whole lot more work. Not saying that’s the case here, but it happens. Regardless, it looks like the maintenance did all the things that one would expect they should do given that the problem was a bad AOA vane in the first place. Very odd that there were 2 back to back AOA failures.
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To be clear there was the same AoA fault on the last 2 flights; the recorded values disagreed by a mostly constant 22 degrees.
The AoA system was not touched before the accident flight.
The AoA sensor had been replaced prior to the last 2 flights, as an apparent troubleshooting step.
The concern is that the penultimate flight crew did not log use of stab trim cutouts or the continuous stick shaker either of which might have led maintenance to check the AoA systems.
At the moment there is no record of "
a whole team of mechanics would have met the aircraft". Hopefully the final report will include a detailed debrief of the penultimate crew.
Your comment on different work levels depending on exact write up is interesting, seems to suggest a somewhat rigid procedure based methodology, rather than a look at all the symptoms and prove things have been resolved.
BTW 22 degrees disagree is from memory, it was somewhere in that range. I also carefully state AoA system rather than AoA vane to avoid stirring up the discussion on possible causes.