Tech Log Paranoia
Since crossing over from Airline to the private Biz Jet world I have become even more acutely aware of the commercial pressure to only snag an aircraft by making the dreaded entry in the tech log if no other options are available.
It is self evident that, without the well established support infrastructure of a major, the consequences of a grounding in SomethingStan is horrendous both in terms of cost and consequences to the client.
The result is that things generally only get written up when miraculously they all occur during a short sector to our engineering facility.
The result of this culture is of course that often a significant number of defects are carried on an airframe that, whilst not critical, are nevertheless something that any crew taking over certainly ought to know about.
So My question is ...how does one disseminate this information without upsetting our engineers whose edict is "Dont put it in writing anywhere because, on any audit, that would be deemed the same as snagging the aircraft by a tech log defect entry"
In my previous life we did for a while put a tech log entry "for information purposes only" but this was frowned on and abolished for the above reason.
So the result is that quite often I take over an aircraft and have to rediscover afresh some quirk or idiosyncracy which a colleague who previously flew it knew all about and came up with a solution as to how to deal with it....
The issue is fresh in my mind because I recently could not refuel my aircraft because the refuelling panel would not work with the APU running......only on battery power! It took me 15 minutes of panic as the clients were arriving to troubleshoot the problem afresh.
How simple would it have been for there to be a pilot information log or handover sheet waiting for me in the cockpit alerting me to this problem and the solution (just as our girls do in the cabin hand over notes)
BUT the very fact of such a written memo would apparently have the same effect as a tech log entry that could only be then cleared by an engineer....so we are not allowed to do it.
Is this unnecessary paranoia or a valid concern?
What does any one else do?