Hi ASFKAP,
I follow your logic, but I could never advocate a pilot clearing the fault himself, especially by pulling c/b’s, without making a tech log entry. This will enable the maint company to spot any trends in reoccurring faults, spurious or otherwise.
Let me give you a hypothetical example of how a pilot and an engineer would view the same problem. Say a test shows Simmonds 7 - the error code for water contamination (I only use this example because it is an untechnical one for us pilots to understand). The crew call an engineer who clears the fault in the way you described and says “don’t worry boys the fault has cleared, it must have been spurious”. I would feel pretty uncomfortable that the engineer had only removed the indication and not the cause. Something must have caused the code to appear in the first place and I would not want to trust my life to a hunch that it was a spurious indication.
In fact, if this did happen to me, I would be asking for a water check in the tank which had showed the error code. I would guess that any pilot who had ever found water in the tanks of his Cessna 150 all those years ago would do the same.
S&L