Because you don’t understand what an A&P licensed Technician is or what the certification means. It also means you likely didn’t understand what you were told about what was causing the delay.
By that I mean they probably initially had someone working on that plane who was new to being a tech. Which tracks because outside of recruiting from the military, a lot of AMT’s recruited to the business are fresh out of highschool or college because that’s when it’s cheapest to hire them, and considering that older technicians are retiring every day. That technician was told there was a specific problem (let’s say a fan cowl door won’t latch). They open that door up to find that the reason it won’t latch is because the latch is broken. To replace the latch they remove some parts, and then find that the reason it’s broken is because some safety wire is broken off a bolt somewhere and wedged itself in such a way that it stressed that latch til it broke. Not only do they have to figure out where that safety wire came from, they have to do further teardown and inspection to make sure that there’s no other damage. Unless you want to randomly lose an engine at 10k+ feet in the air where you can’t pull over to the side of the road. And that’s where being a subject matter expert on that particular model platform of plane would be preferred. Because while any AMT could find where that safety wire came from, not any AMT could do it on the Line without delaying a plane.
And that’s why I said you were blaming Technicians. Because you were blaming Techs for the delay. Which in actuality was probably caused by something outside their control. Have a nice life dude. Your opinion is trash.
Yeah, no. I was very clear that I was not blaming the techs, but you go ahead, keep insisting on that.
I do not blame line workers for failings of management, which is exactly what I said I thought this was.
Maybe I am wrong here, wouldn’t be the first time. If so, sorry for busting your chops like that. I’ve just seen too many businesses cutting corners and compromising safety to save a couple bucks, so maybe I’m overly jaded for this one. But the ire was NEVER directed at the techs.
United is still garbage and was miserable every time I flew with them, so regardless of the truth behind that incident I still stand by my decision to never fly with them again, and if that hadn’t happened on that trip, the rest of the trip was enough to make me want nothing to do with them again.
Can I ask exactly what you expected them to do? The managers or gate staff or whoever?
I ask because delays when they happen are usually tied to federal regulations about who can fly, what can fly, in what condition, in what weather, etc. So if they found something to be mechanically wrong with your plane and not fixable in a way that is airworthy, generally that plane would be grounded and the airline would then have to scramble to find accommodation.
While I’ll grant you that airlines overbook pretty much every plane in the event that people don’t show up, and that’s a scummy practice, I also fully understand that this decision was definitely not made by some.manager actively at the airport. This was a decision from the executive suite of the company.
I don’t have good things to say about flying United, American, or Delta, even. I’m a bit biased about Southwest. But I haven’t really had any problems with them. Believe it or not, same with Alaska despite the recent bad press.
I have been delayed many a time. I recognise that it can be devastatingly inconvenient and problematic. It can cost customers significant amounts of money and time.
I’m not saying it’s unreasonable to be angry. I’m saying that the airport staff who likely would have related this information to you (pilot, flight attendants, gate staff) also aren’t responsible. Further, the person who tasked that AMT or those AMT’s to work on the plane you were on is likely doing their best to utilise staff efficiently and effectively to keep planes in the air because that’s their job, and that job becomes exponentially harder when planes are grounded.
Your ire seems to be directed towards the airline at large, and it seems like you had an expectation of what would and should happen that I feel is unreasonable given what I know.
You haven’t really made it clear what you expected except the things I have spoken to in previous comments in this thread. But even if you didn’t mean it that way, what you basically said is that the AMT wasn’t qualified (which isn’t true) to be working on the model of plane that they were servicing, and that caused a delay. Which is why I said you were blaming the AMT. The fact that the manager of that AMT is also probably an AMT as well is something you seem to have glossed over.
The other thing I want to point out is that the cost of keeping planes on standby in the case of mechanical issues grounding a different plane would be astronomical, and that cost would probably triple or quadruple the cost of your plane ticket. At an airlines hub airport that might be feasible. But airport hangar space is limited and the run on costs of doing so are so cost prohibitive to most customers (not to mention the lack of AMT’s available to make it happen), that I just don’t understand what you expect a better result to look like.
We’re not talking about shade tree mechanics on their garage tearing down an engine here. We’re talking about highly trained AMT’s who are part of a maintenance apparatus that is heavily heavily regulated by the federal government.
I expected them to have mechanics working on the planes that had proper training for them. This is based on what I was told by the gate attendants, which I’ll admit may not have been accurate.
That expectation is not levied at anyone in the local chain of command; it’s directed at the decision making at he executive level that would lead to maintenance crews working on engines they weren’t certified/trained on.
Part of it I will admit comes down to my frustration with watching the engine become progressively dissembled while waiting for hours and watching the clock run out on my rental, but I never blamed the people there. I’ve worked IT for a long time and know first hand that the people talking to you are usually just doing the best they can and often following policy that they have no flexibility in. Even local management often has their hands tied.
If I came across blaming the techs or the crew or management at the airport, which it sounds like I did at least to you, I’m sorry for that, it really wasn’t ever my intention. At the point the plane needed something fixed, the situation was already way too far gone to salvage, and whether it was because it was more serious than it first appeared or there simply wasn’t the right experience available, the damage was already done and nothing anyone there at that time would have salvaged it.
Waiting on the replacement plane was frustrating, but logistics are logistics and you can’t summon a plane or crew from thin air, crews can only fly so long without a break safely, and keeping additional extremely expensive planes sitting around gathering dust waiting to be needed at every airport just doesn’t make sense.
My expectation (which it sounds increasingly like to me was down to misunderstanding of what’s involved, which you’ve been trying to tell me) was that airlines will have maintenance crews that know the planes they’re working on. You’re saying this was probably outside the scope of what’s a typical maintenance crew is able to tackle in a short time, like a car mechanic checking a seemingly minor leak and ultimately finding out the engine needs to be rebuilt.
But again, never did blame anyone but upper management, who were nowhere near anyone at that airport during that, and I hope that’s now clear
Because you don’t understand what an A&P licensed Technician is or what the certification means. It also means you likely didn’t understand what you were told about what was causing the delay.
By that I mean they probably initially had someone working on that plane who was new to being a tech. Which tracks because outside of recruiting from the military, a lot of AMT’s recruited to the business are fresh out of highschool or college because that’s when it’s cheapest to hire them, and considering that older technicians are retiring every day. That technician was told there was a specific problem (let’s say a fan cowl door won’t latch). They open that door up to find that the reason it won’t latch is because the latch is broken. To replace the latch they remove some parts, and then find that the reason it’s broken is because some safety wire is broken off a bolt somewhere and wedged itself in such a way that it stressed that latch til it broke. Not only do they have to figure out where that safety wire came from, they have to do further teardown and inspection to make sure that there’s no other damage. Unless you want to randomly lose an engine at 10k+ feet in the air where you can’t pull over to the side of the road. And that’s where being a subject matter expert on that particular model platform of plane would be preferred. Because while any AMT could find where that safety wire came from, not any AMT could do it on the Line without delaying a plane.
And that’s why I said you were blaming Technicians. Because you were blaming Techs for the delay. Which in actuality was probably caused by something outside their control. Have a nice life dude. Your opinion is trash.
Yeah, no. I was very clear that I was not blaming the techs, but you go ahead, keep insisting on that.
I do not blame line workers for failings of management, which is exactly what I said I thought this was.
Maybe I am wrong here, wouldn’t be the first time. If so, sorry for busting your chops like that. I’ve just seen too many businesses cutting corners and compromising safety to save a couple bucks, so maybe I’m overly jaded for this one. But the ire was NEVER directed at the techs.
United is still garbage and was miserable every time I flew with them, so regardless of the truth behind that incident I still stand by my decision to never fly with them again, and if that hadn’t happened on that trip, the rest of the trip was enough to make me want nothing to do with them again.
Can I ask exactly what you expected them to do? The managers or gate staff or whoever?
I ask because delays when they happen are usually tied to federal regulations about who can fly, what can fly, in what condition, in what weather, etc. So if they found something to be mechanically wrong with your plane and not fixable in a way that is airworthy, generally that plane would be grounded and the airline would then have to scramble to find accommodation.
While I’ll grant you that airlines overbook pretty much every plane in the event that people don’t show up, and that’s a scummy practice, I also fully understand that this decision was definitely not made by some.manager actively at the airport. This was a decision from the executive suite of the company.
I don’t have good things to say about flying United, American, or Delta, even. I’m a bit biased about Southwest. But I haven’t really had any problems with them. Believe it or not, same with Alaska despite the recent bad press.
I have been delayed many a time. I recognise that it can be devastatingly inconvenient and problematic. It can cost customers significant amounts of money and time.
I’m not saying it’s unreasonable to be angry. I’m saying that the airport staff who likely would have related this information to you (pilot, flight attendants, gate staff) also aren’t responsible. Further, the person who tasked that AMT or those AMT’s to work on the plane you were on is likely doing their best to utilise staff efficiently and effectively to keep planes in the air because that’s their job, and that job becomes exponentially harder when planes are grounded.
Your ire seems to be directed towards the airline at large, and it seems like you had an expectation of what would and should happen that I feel is unreasonable given what I know.
You haven’t really made it clear what you expected except the things I have spoken to in previous comments in this thread. But even if you didn’t mean it that way, what you basically said is that the AMT wasn’t qualified (which isn’t true) to be working on the model of plane that they were servicing, and that caused a delay. Which is why I said you were blaming the AMT. The fact that the manager of that AMT is also probably an AMT as well is something you seem to have glossed over.
The other thing I want to point out is that the cost of keeping planes on standby in the case of mechanical issues grounding a different plane would be astronomical, and that cost would probably triple or quadruple the cost of your plane ticket. At an airlines hub airport that might be feasible. But airport hangar space is limited and the run on costs of doing so are so cost prohibitive to most customers (not to mention the lack of AMT’s available to make it happen), that I just don’t understand what you expect a better result to look like.
We’re not talking about shade tree mechanics on their garage tearing down an engine here. We’re talking about highly trained AMT’s who are part of a maintenance apparatus that is heavily heavily regulated by the federal government.
I expected them to have mechanics working on the planes that had proper training for them. This is based on what I was told by the gate attendants, which I’ll admit may not have been accurate.
That expectation is not levied at anyone in the local chain of command; it’s directed at the decision making at he executive level that would lead to maintenance crews working on engines they weren’t certified/trained on.
Part of it I will admit comes down to my frustration with watching the engine become progressively dissembled while waiting for hours and watching the clock run out on my rental, but I never blamed the people there. I’ve worked IT for a long time and know first hand that the people talking to you are usually just doing the best they can and often following policy that they have no flexibility in. Even local management often has their hands tied.
If I came across blaming the techs or the crew or management at the airport, which it sounds like I did at least to you, I’m sorry for that, it really wasn’t ever my intention. At the point the plane needed something fixed, the situation was already way too far gone to salvage, and whether it was because it was more serious than it first appeared or there simply wasn’t the right experience available, the damage was already done and nothing anyone there at that time would have salvaged it.
Waiting on the replacement plane was frustrating, but logistics are logistics and you can’t summon a plane or crew from thin air, crews can only fly so long without a break safely, and keeping additional extremely expensive planes sitting around gathering dust waiting to be needed at every airport just doesn’t make sense.
My expectation (which it sounds increasingly like to me was down to misunderstanding of what’s involved, which you’ve been trying to tell me) was that airlines will have maintenance crews that know the planes they’re working on. You’re saying this was probably outside the scope of what’s a typical maintenance crew is able to tackle in a short time, like a car mechanic checking a seemingly minor leak and ultimately finding out the engine needs to be rebuilt.
But again, never did blame anyone but upper management, who were nowhere near anyone at that airport during that, and I hope that’s now clear