In our club every pilot member has the power to ground an airplane. We have placards in the planes that are to be put on the pilot’s seat in this case. If that happens, the pilot who grounds the plane has to contact the plane captain (one person responsible per plane) asap, who in turn determines further action, in 90+ % of cases after conferring with our mx facilities. Only our A&Ps can make entries into the airplane logs, with a very limited number of exceptions. We used to track our mx issues on paper logs, but have done away with that and now track everything in our online scheduling system. This also gives pilots who intend to fly a plane an advance notice of any issues. System works well and we have extremely few issues with planes being grounded for no good reason. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but as current president of our club I – and everybody else – prefer people to err on the side of caution.
I don’t recognise or understand the concept of a pilot ‘grounding’ an aeroplane. They can decline to fly it themselves but I don’t see how that affects anyone else.
I cannot cite chapter and verse, but presume a licensed engineer can declare an aeroplane unfit for flight such that anyone who flies it subsequently is flying illegally.
Any club official or instructor ‘grounding’ an aeroplane is surely just a case of “our aeroplane, our rules” rather than anything in regulation?
Back when I rented I considered it politic to speak to a member of staff before recording anything in the paperwork, but on more than one occasion I rejected an aircraft. Sometimes they wrote it up and sent the aircraft to engineering and sometimes they didn’t – that’s up to them – but the final decision to fly or not rests with me and if I reject the aircraft then I don’t pay for it.
It’s all very well getting caught up in a discussion of who’s standards are being applied and whether they are reasonable, or even whether the person concerned knows enough to make an informed decision, but as a pilot the only standards that really matter are your own. When you have a problem in the air the fact that someone else told you the defect didn’t matter is not much help.
Graham wrote:
I don’t recognise or understand the concept of a pilot ‘grounding’ an aeroplane. They can decline to fly it themselves but I don’t see how that affects anyone else.
Under part-M, any deficiency entered into the logbook and not deferred would ground the aircraft unless there was a MEL. So if pilots could enter deficiencies they could also ground the aircraft. The “thinking” was that only mechanics could determine if a deficiency made the aircraft unfit for flight or not. Not that anyone I know cared (I certainly didn’t) or even knew about that rule. It is different with the new part-ML.
