Joseph D. Darcy's Sun Weblog

Monday February 09, 2009

The Three R's of Airplane Maintenance

Complementing the three grade school R's of reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, I've heard it said there are three R's of Windows system administration, retry, reboot, and reinstall. When flying recently, I experienced the Windows R's being applied to airplane maintenance too. After everyone had boarded the plane, the pilot announced there was a problem with the navigation system and they were trying repeatedly to clear the problem. After that didn't work, the pilot came back on to say the maintenance crew was going to power down the entire plane so it could be restarted; even the emergency lighting blinked off for several minutes. Finally, with the fault still showing after the plane booted back up, the airline reinstalled us passengers on a spare plane and we were on our way with just a two hour delay.