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Back in the mists of time, when Pontius was a Pilot, we used to have any number of grey (intermittent) items in the ADDs, with a note saying 'please report further'. (I counted 12 ADDS for one aircraft in XXX airline.) Some of these were even pertaining to critical items, like flight instruments, controls and deicing systems. And everyone was quite happy with this arrangement.
Then we had the naughties - the age of smoke, mirrors, litigation and the telling of obvious (political) porkies to pretend that everything was fine. In this new political climate, aircraft systems were either black (failed) or white (working), and we pretended that the grey (intermittent) never happened. Never at all - amazing really. In this brave new world, the grey failure has either to be rectified (when engineering still does not know what to rectify) or signed off as fully working, even when every sentient being in aviation knows it will fail again on the next flight.
Thus the grey item has been banned from ADDs. "You cannot put that in the techlog", is the cry, "it is not an MEL item".
That may be so, but what is safer:
a. pretend it is working, when we know it is probably not?
b. put it in the ADDs, so the next crew know of the potential problem?
New management and the CAA want us to lie and cover it up. I think it is safer to tell the truth about the grey item, and let everyone know about it.
A case in point is the Turkish AMS crash.
The aircraft had a known intermittent (grey) problem with the No1 radalt, that led to the thrust levers retarding to idle. This had been previously entered in the techlog, but instead of leaving it as an open grey ADD, it was cleared as serviceable (when it clearly was not).
The net result was the next crew did not know of the potential problem and crashed.
Had the defect been left open in the ADDs as "system intermittent fault - tested found serviceable, but please report further", the next crew would have known about it. They would have come down the ILS, seen the retarded thrust levers, recognised the symptom, recovered the power setting - and then when safely on the ground have added to the ADDS "system did it again".
Methodology a. tries to be ever so legal and proper and yet deliberately deceitful - and it succeeds in killing several people.
Methodology b. is less legal but more honest - and would have prevented an accident.
So what does our Brave New World say is the preferred methodology? Well, a. of course. You know it makes sense.
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