Rant: the engineer who blamed me for his own mistake

Last month I was doing a preflight check on a Cessna 172 at JFK. Found a loose spark plug wire. Simple fix. The lead engineer came over, looked at it, said I must have knocked it loose during my inspection. He told me to sign off on it like nothing happened. I refused. Later found out he forgot to torque it after the last engine run. Has anyone else dealt with engineers passing the buck like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

finley_wells663h ago

Had a buddy out at LaGuardia tell me about something similar with a fuel line clamp last year. Engineer tried to blame him for a loose clamp after a 737 engine swap, turned out the engineer skipped the final torque check on three of them. Took a supervisor digging through the logs to clear my friend's name. Its wild how some guys will risk a whole inspection record instead of owning up.

sageallen35m ago

The thing that gets me is nobody ever talks about how this kind of thing messes with the whole team dynamic long after the fix. Once word gets around that one guy tried to throw someone under the bus, trust just tanks. People start double checking everything, which sounds good on paper but slows down work and creates this weird tension on the line. It's like that one incident plants a seed of doubt that takes months to go away, if it ever does. And the worst part is the guy who caused it usually just moves on to another shift or station, leaving everyone else to deal with the fallout.