Sorry to sound a bit of a 'cee uu next tuesday' here but these kind of postings always alarm me somewhat...
Where is the maintenance dept?
Where is the CFI??
Fair enough if you're on a day off away from the school but so many (experienced) instructors spot a potential problem and sod off home without thinking to pop it on the engineers 'do-list'. Also, many instructors assume that another instructor will highlight the same issue yet this is precisely how an incident or accident could occur. I am not saying I'm innocent of such behaviour myself but it's about time we got our act together is it not?
I have witnessed defects ignored time and time again by instructors at more than one school, usually accompanied with comments from ops such as: "...xxxx xxxxxx flew with it this morning and didn't have a problem wiv it" which seems to be the byword for "... it's okay for you to fly it".
Sometimes yer just gotta be the man to sort it yourself which usually means simply poking yer head around the door of maintanence, getting on the phone to maintanence or popping a line or two on the engineers sheet. Of course, God forbid we ever ground an a/c by putting something in the techlog! I did that once and judging by the horrified looks of onlooking instructors one would think I'd just flopped me cock out on the ops managers desk!*
The culture which leads to instructors trying to gleen answers from an anonymous internet forum is worrying and needs to be addressed. The proper channels are there for such issues so why waste time?
Apologies if this is not the case.
VFE.
* A door on a PA-28 that only opened from the inside after 3 minutes of fiddling with it and no master compass would seem enough to ground an aircraft IMHO. Two instructors had flown with it that day and taken around 3 minutes to get out of the a/c after landing yet still didn't say anything.