Many suns ago a senior colleague flew a A330 from KUL to ADL despatched under MEL with a wing tip breaker fault. This was despatchable for 10 days after which the system locks out, meaning repair must be made within 10 days.
After landing at ADL and getting to sleep at the layover hotel he was frantically awakened by the station manager who wanted to know why he had brought a broken aircraft to ADL! To cut a long story short, the aircraft was AOG due to the WTB locking out entirely! The engineers at ADL and maintenance control at KUL couldn't figure out; neither did the Airbus technical representatives. The station manager, in all his wisdom, thought the inbound crew had f**ked up the system during the flight from KUL to ADL! The inbound skipper was none too pleased to have been woken rudely and accused of f**king up the aircraft. After much discussion, the skipper wryly asked if anybody had messed with the aircraft clock! Voila, somebody did....the outbound f/o was resetting the
clock and caused the date and month setting to slew forward by more than 10 days! That caused the total lock out of the WTB! Eureka! The aircraft time base was tied up with the cockpit clock. Oopsy!
All the engineering brainiacs sheepishly covered up the whole episode as a " one off " , " transient " problem. AI glossed over it and all the aviation " conspiracy sceptics" pooh poohed it to consign that incident as urban myth at the behest of their patrons and paymasters.
Last edited by gerago; 17th Sep 2012 at 20:33.