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.
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.
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.
This is a potentially red hot topic within a flying school/club, for the reasons already outlined: defects reported by renters can be real, or they can be imagined, and if they make a plane un-rentable that costs money, and gets hot politically if the discussion of the issue is within hearing distance of another potential renter or better still a potential PPL student whose ~€10k+ “deposition” is highly desired.
The schools I was at (for various reasons I have already written about years ago, more than one) used a special phrase to disguise that they had an unusable plane: “gone tech”.
One event I recall I mentioned here. Its supposed rectification was faked (it was never fixed).
As MattL outlines above things have got a bit more formalised now since my PPL training 20 years ago but the politics will remain. With notable exceptions with more modern fleets, the planes used are mostly quite old and those range from rather tired through really shagged all the way to outright dangerous like this. That school looked really bad in the accident report on the famous G-OMAR crash, mentioned e.g. here and is now gone.
Great discussion 
In a U.K. training operation you are required to have a defect recording and Deferred Defect system. Deferred defects should be done in accordance with the operators MEL. Like most, we use an aircraft tech log system for this.
We limit who can formally raise defects (Anyone can raise the issue, just the recording action) as they often require some interpretation or are pilot finger trouble rather than an actual defect – avionics problems very commonly are people messing up settings.
LeSving wrote:
It is not clear to me how you actually ground a (certified) aircraft. Simply writing a small snag in the book doesn’t ground the aircraft in my book (ho ho …), or does it?
It did under part-M. Not that anyone I know ever cared. (Nor did I.)
Why not use a “snag notice board” for pilots only and let “aircraft logbook” to mechanics only?
We try not to write anything in the aeroplane logbook – our “club mechanic” does this if he sees fit to do so. We have a little notebook for each aeroplane that any aeroclub pilot can write literally anything in, to bring to his attention if something even seems odd, let alone is broken.
I think it is worth repeating that it is up to PIC to decide if you want to fly an aeroplane – you can always walk away.
Regards, SD..
It is not clear to me how you actually ground a (certified) aircraft. Simply writing a small snag in the book doesn’t ground the aircraft in my book (ho ho …), or does it? Anyway, I think that way too few people write, or inform, about snags. Many simply ignore stuff, pretend they didn’t see it or whatever. Whenever I find something I always write it in the book, unless easily fixed.
Often, in clubs you find someone who will ‘ground’ the aircraft for really minor things, so clubs tend to require a second opinion… I grounded the cub once, but that was after one of the magnetos was not working, discussion with an instructor and trying several times. The mechanic did find that something was wrong (don’t remember exactly). On the other hand, the autopilot on the C172 was inoperative for some time, and the plane was not grounded (who needs an autopilot, hei??? no such device on real aircraft :-)), but it could have been if left completely up to any pilot without second opinion…
