A fairly (very in some cases) common practice in the Flight Training environment is the use of the abbreviation " ", i.e. nothing, the direction from senior management being that nothing is to be written in the Deferred Defects section of the Tech Logs, especially on a weekend, in case that grounds the aircraft and that you must always speak to maintenance first.
That is a double edged sword, the negative being that records of minor faults are at best inadequate, at worst non-existent, the positive being that a relationship develops between engineers and pilots (who learn that both sides are human
) and the engineer gets a detailed, first line account of the problem from the person identifying it, not a meaningless jumble of words, rapidly scrawled by instructors between lessons.
It also helps to break down language differences, as I found working overseas.
Some of the best lessons I ever learned as a pilot were gained working with maintenance crews on minor defects.
