What is the purpose of walk arounds?
Hi there,
When I started out doing a PPL back in Australia before I moved to the USA, we spent a fair amount of time going through walk arounds, checking fuel to ensure it wasn't contaminated, checking panels, etc.
The other day, I took an American Eagle flight on a CRJ 140. The co-pilot skirted around the red line surrounding the plane, and barely looked at it. She never touched the plane, and didn't look at the horizontal stabilizer at all as she never looked up. From the time it rolled in, to the time we took off, the only "technical" folks who touched the plane was the refueller.
I was thinking a bit more about this. The CRJ-140, being a smaller aircraft, would allow most folks to touch most of the panels that open and shut, look at the undercarriage, and reach the fuel tanks to check the fuel. Once you get to a bigger aircraft, this becomes more and more difficult.
If commercial pilots don't bother doing a walk around properly, why do they still do it? Was this co-pilot wrong to not carefully check out the aircraft externally? Or are there different rules once you move to jets?
I'm not asking this for a flame fest, I'm truly interested from an education perspective.
Andrew