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Logged my 5,000th squawk in the binder last Tuesday, and the first 200 pages hit different
I started keeping a personal log of every squawk I signed off back when I was a green A&P at a shop in Wichita in 2009, and last Tuesday the notebook finally hit 5,000 entries. Flipping back through the early pages, I found stuff I would not even write up today, like a loose fairing screw on a 172 that I spent 45 minutes on because I was scared to ask the lead. These days most of my fixes are the same dozen items on the same handful of airframes, but that first stretch taught me more than any class did. The old guys used to say the plane tells you what it needs if you listen, and after 5,000 write ups I finally get what they meant. Any of you keep a personal log like this, or do you just trust the shop paperwork to remember it for you?
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henderson.kim16d ago
That line about a loose fairing screw and being scared to ask the lead really hit me. What you're really building there is a record of your own judgment changing over time, not just a list of write ups. 5,000 entries is basically a map of when you stopped guessing and started knowing. I'd bet those early pages are worth more to a new guy than any torque spec chart.
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