Engineers leaving switches in the wrong positions??
So what is the checklist for??
It's an annoyance factor for the pilot, but yes, that is why there is a pilots' checklist. A particular one is aircraft handed over with CB's left tripped when it should be obvious to the engineer that they are never like that for flight (unless collared and recorded as such).
But don't engineers also have a post maintenance checklist?
Lolly sticks left in the squat switches, a proper preflight inspection would have picked this up.
Tony
Yes, it should have done -
if it was on the pilot's pre-flight inspection checklist to check the squat switches for lolly sticks jammed in the contacts....
But a checklist doesn't necessarily cover the situation where non-controlled and/or unauthorised tools or procedures have been used during maintenance and items left in out of the way places. Even if lolly sticks were/are the correct and controlled tools for the job, why did the engineer leave them in place after maintenance? See above question about engineers' post maintenance checklists. What about proper engineering oversight / quality control?
In the past, I was in a situation where the chief engineer of a major UK maintenance company, under contract for quite a large fleet of RAF aircraft, complained about we pilots. In his opinion we were doing "too thorough" pre-flight walk-round inspections before taking our aircraft away after deep maintenance. In his opinion, it undermined the integrity of his company and was disrespectful to his engineers. He made a pompous and angry phone call to our boss after a colleague of mine picked up his aircraft from them, after they had watched him do his pre-flight.
On landing back at base from that flight the pilot reported that the ASI had come loose and the engine RPM gauge fell out of the instrument panel.
Faults like these were so common with that particular contractor that our base engineers opened an A4 sized book specifically to record them. I saw the book, it had many pages of defects found after the aircraft returned to us, some of them quite serious. Not surprisingly, the contract wasn't renewed.