Hit 10,000 flight hours logged and it caught me off guard

I was going through my maintenance logbook from the last contract in Phoenix and noticed I crossed 10,000 flight hours total. That number just hit me different, I never thought of myself as that seasoned. Ten thousand hours is a lot of time staring at wiring diagrams and chasing intermittent faults at 3 AM. It made me think about all the little fixes that got me here, like the time I traced a ghost issue to a chafed bundle behind the aft bulkhead. I guess I wanted to ask the folks here, when did you realize you had hit a big milestone and did it change how you approach your work at all? I feel like I should trust my instincts more now, but part of me wonders if I got lucky on some of those calls.

1 comments

1 Comment

faithg263d ago

Congrats on the 10k, but let's be real, that just means you've officially spent a whole year of your life staring at panels and swearing under your breath. The chafed bundle story is classic though, every avionics guy has one of those, it's like a rite of passage. Lucky or not, you made the call and it worked, that's what counts in this line of work. If you were actually terrible, you'd have crashed something by hour 500, not made it to 10k. Just keep doing what you're doing and the next 10k will sneak up on you too, probably while you're on a toilet in Rammstein or something. Trusting your gut is fine, just double check your work when the coffee's worn off.