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Old timer at Piedmont told me to never bypass the ground straps on the APU
Back when I was still green at the hangar in Charlotte, got a rush job on a 737 APU swap and I was about to skip checking those ground straps to save 20 minutes. This old mechanic, Dave, yanked me aside and said "you skip that step and you'll be pulling that APU back out within three months." Sure enough, six months later a different crew skipped that exact step on the same fleet and that plane came back with generator surges that fried two control modules. Cost the company close to 12 grand in parts and labor. Any of you guys ever seen a shortcut like that blow up way worse than anyone expected?
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jade_jenkins1mo ago
Learned that lesson myself when a bypassed ground strap took out an entire ECU bank on a Gulfstream.
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holly_reed551mo ago
That story reminds me of when a buddy of mine worked at an MRO in Atlanta and they had a Learjet come in with some weird electrical gremlins. The lead mechanic was so sure it was a bad alternator he had the new one on before checking the grounding strap to the airframe. Three test flights later and the brand new alternator was toast, plus it took out the voltage regulator and part of the battery bus. They ended up having to replace almost the whole charging system just because nobody took five minutes to check that strap.
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