Originally Posted by
Lead Balloon
What about old mate whom Motorola says is in the habit of: "scamming the system by carrying around a spare set of covers to fool flight crews with"?
Deliberate circumvention of safety protocols in other industries is typically grounds for immediate dismissal; it's hard to imagine why this would not be the case where hundreds of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment are put at risk.
But the example illustrates nicely why an engineering solution (pitots which are somehow inherently wasp-proof) or elimination (some other way of determining air speed) would be inherently safer than an administrative process requiring fitting and removal of covers, which is open to accidental or deliberate errors.