It’s an interesting thread and as I said in another thread it’s up to you the PIC to accept an MEL. It however goes beyond MEL’s it goes to your responsibility as to what you believe to be safe, how fatiguing are the operational procedures in the MEL? No APU in my part of the world would mean a hot cabin very quickly if ground support didn’t have ground ac ready to roll.
Flying a bus, the ole paper techlog days. I always used to flick through the last few pages to see how the old girl had been behaving. Now if my reasoning was correct and my FO agreed, the old girl had 2 computers (yes dumbed down), replaced from 2 different other machines as they were trying to fault find (2 other aircraft). Now I’m no smarty but I figured that in a machine that had 3 computers and had 2 suss ones from other machines then….. Yeah nah I ain’t no test pilot and called the CP.
His first thought was nah, engineering wouldn’t do that, on confirmation I had his full support. Less than a 30 min delay as a spare new computer was plugged in so now we only had one on ‘test’.
Airlines will do anything to save a buck, it’s up to the PIC to make sure they accept an aircraft. As for multiple MEL’s, I was always lucky enough to have a pretty good fleet to fly with generally great support. However as above things still slipped through the cracks.
Now I know others would have accepted the aircraft and flown but not me.