I recently flew a regional airline from my smallish airport (FCA) to a major hub (ORD). It happened to be United Express, but I don’t think this issue is related to United in particular. We boarded the plane on time, and sat there waiting as we went past the anticipated push back time. At 10 minutes past departure time the captain announced that the only toilet on the plane was not flushing, and that we would have to use water to flush the toilet. No problem.
The captain said that because we were at a small airport (not sure why that mattered) they would have to fill out some paperwork manually. An hour later we pushed back and took off. Does it really take 50 minutes to fill out a few forms and send them off to HQ? Was something else going on that the captain wasn’t tell us about, like did they have to request a new landing slot at ORD?
Probably ORD slots had nothing to do with it (unless the weather at ORD was crappy) and the Captain was telling the truth.
For a defect the general process is this:
Discover defect.
Notify local maintenance via radio from the cockpit. They send a company tech to the jet and notify Maintenance HQ. The tech lives in a cave under the terminal and will be onboard almost immediately unless he’s already working another problem first.
Tech looks it up in his big book on his tablet to see if we can go with it broken and if so what special considerations and mitigation work need to be done before departure.
Tech does all the mitigation work following the procedure in his tablet. For a busted lav that typically includes things like draining the tank, disconnecting the power to the flush motor, pulling and securing some circuit breakers, placing approved signs in the lav and in the cockpit near those circuit breakers.
Document everything in the official paper log book. If the issue affects the flying qualities of the airplane (which a toilet usually doesn’t) that may involve coordination with Pilot HQ to get a modified flight plan and perhaps a different fuel load. And more paper.
Obtain the paper receipts from the maintenance and ops computer systems documenting that everything was documented.
Fly to ORD.
That’s the process we use when at a station with company maintenance workers on duty. Everybody knows the process cold, works on these type & configuration of airplane every day, etc. We’re configured for success. Or at least for minimum wasted time.
Now imagine the same thing happens at a station where the airline does not employ any maintenance workers. Instead there’s some outfit called “Fix-Ur-Jetz-Kwik” that has a couple of licensed guys in shabby white vans that service all the airlines when they break. And maybe they also fix bizjets over on the other side of the airport. Individually the workers are probably about as competent with a wrench as ours are. But the whole system is decidedly lowest-bidder.
So instead the process goes like this:
Discover defect.
Call Maintenance HQ via cellphone. Wait in queue to get to a live person. Tell them the problem and we consult the big book together to see the mitigation process. Captain tells the pax it’ll be awhile.
Maintenance HQ calls Fix-Ur-Jetz-Kwik. They say “we’ll send somebody right over.” Maybe they send Bob immediately but instead maybe they will just as soon as Bob finishes the other problem he’s working on for the airline next door. Which might take 30-45 minutes.
Maintenance HQ faxes a copy of the mitigation procedure to Fix-Ur-Jetz-Kwik. When Bob’s ready he drives to his shop to go get it, then drives to our airplane. Add 15-30 minutes; even small airports have huge perimeters and cutting across the middle is frowned upon.
Bob eventually gets to the jet. The whole time we’re waiting all we know is “he’s not here yet”. Nobody can give us a reliable ETA to pass to you.
Bob does the work. He may or may not work on this type very often and has to be familiar with reading & following various airlines’ different procedures and paperwork. If we’re lucky he’s good and it goes quickly. If he hits snags he calls our Maintenance HQ on his cellphone and they try to talk him past the snag. Eventually the work is done.
Bob documents everything in the official log book. With luck he does it per our standards and not those of the other airline.
We call Maintenance HQ on the cellphone to tell them that Bob is done. They grant their imprimatur for us to remotely bless the log book as good to go.
We obtain the paper receipts from the maintenance and ops computer systems documenting that everything was documented.
Fly to ORD.
Moral of the story: As airplanes get more reliable, it becomes less and less economically feasible to have dedicated staff standing by every day doing nothing but twiddling their thumbs most of most days. But once something does break, that means the leaner more efficient 21st Century process is a lot slower and a lot less predictable.
I was once on a flight from Philly to London and we were waiting at the gate before boarding. The desk attendant said that it was a ‘catering’ issue. They must have been catering hydraulic fluid as I was watching them change a hydraulic pump on the #1 engine.
“Moral of the story: As airplanes get more reliable, it becomes less and less economically feasible to have dedicated staff standing by every day doing nothing but twiddling their thumbs most of most days. But once something does break, that means the leaner more efficient 21st Century process is a lot slower and a lot less predictable.”
Or the moral is that airlines, in n effort to educe costs and increase profits, eliminate services that they can outsource at a cheaper price. If you happen to miss your connecting flight as a result, so be it.
I’m not sure if this is relevant to an FAA operation or not, but in CASA land the pilot in command can defer maintenance when there are no qualified engineers available and the securing process is simple (generally just involving the pulling and collaring of circuit breakers.) This allows the company to have ports where they have no engineering support at all, not even the contractors mentioned by LSLGuy. The process then involves the Captain checking the minimum equipment list (MEL) to see if the defect can be deferred and if it is notated as “FCM” (flight crew maintenance approved). Then he/she will write the defect up in the maintenance log, defer the defect using the procedures in the MEL, then fill out a separate form that releases the aircraft back to service. They will also confer with maintenance HQ and send the paperwork through to them. All of this takes time, particularly seeing as it is not done all that often and the flight crew are likely to be a bit slow as they try to make sure they get it all right.
That is what I thought of when I read the OP, but as I say, may not be applicable to an FAA airline.
Our procedures are mostly as you said. The challenge is there’s a horde or MEL items that require some mitigating maintenance action beyond a simple pull-and-collar. If one of those happens we’re stuck.
With the ever increasing computerization of records has come even less tolerance by the FAA for administrative foul-ups, innocent and operationally harmless though they may be. So now we require with a 3-way conference call between Maintenance control, the dispatcher, and the PIC for every single crew-deferrable item. If it happens after we’ve pushed we figure 15 minutes in a holding pad with engines running while we dot all the t’s and cross all the i’s. Every. Damn. Time.
I can see your point, but FCA is the airport code for Kallispel, MT, and the flight to O’Hare is 3 hours and 42 minutes.
I’d like to have at least a contract maintenance person look at the plane’s only restroom before the pilot in command says, “Hell, let’s take off anyway!”
My best story was a 60 minute delay while they “fixed” a tray table that would not stay in the upright position. As God is my witness, after much delay and back-and-forth, a maintenance guy (two, actually) walks down the aisle with a roll of duct tape. The amazing thing was how long it took for them to decide that was the repair.
A PR move. If they announced that, look, we’ve got an engine with a problem and Billy-Bob is going to add some fluid to it and fix the thingee then we’ll to take off and fly VS… A catering problem, we didn’t get enough peanuts delivered. Which announcement is likely to make the passengers remain calm?
Bad PR move IMO. Tell them the truth. The simplified truth, but the truth. Including the degree of uncertainty in any predictions.
Better yet, don’t predict at all. But that’s hard to do since really the only info of any use to the customer is “Are we going to leave at all? When will that be?” And those are the two things we can’t realistically predict until *all *the issues of whatever nature are *fully *resolved.
Also, when it rains it pours. It’s not uncommon to have catering problems on long haul flights. So there might indeed have been a catering problem in addition to the hydraulic mess.
Well it’s a toilet, a convenience device, and it was still useable. From a piloting perspective having an unserviceable flush system doesn’t affect the safety of the flight and so the crew are probably happy to take it. Then there’s the commercial decision of whether the company would rather have the flight delayed / possibly cancelled or have the passengers use a bottle of water to flush with, that’s a decision for the company operations team to make. As far as engineering goes, there’s little point trying to arrange an ad hoc engineer to look at something like that. If they can work out what’s wrong, they won’t have parts, so all they can do is sign for the deferral which the flight crew can do anyway.
It’s the type of decision that happens on a fairly regular basis. E.g., you may have an unserviceable autopilot:
Can it be fixed in time to make schedule? No, no engineers available.
Is it safe to fly without it? Consult with engineering HQ and consider the threats for the next leg. Engineering is ok, there’s nice weather and it’s a short sector, so yes.
Is it legal to fly without it? Consult the MEL and engineering HQ. Yes it is legal.
Are there any commercial considerations, e.g., departing from a port that has spare parts to a port that doesn’t have spare parts, or time taken to fix it now vs time lost down stream? Not the flight crew’s decision but the company will advise. Lets say they want the flight to depart.
Decision made to depart without a serviceable autopilot and without having an engineer actually look at the system.
We can even depart with an unserviceable engine! Not with passengers, but consider the case where we have a broken starter motor. We can legally take-off on three engines, perform an air-start of the forth one, land, load the passengers with the dodgy engine idling, then depart. It’s not something I’ve heard of being done but there is a procedure for it. How would that feel as a passenger, being told that the aircraft basically has to push start one of its engines ;)?
That doesn’t surprise me. They were probably checking first if there’s an easy fix, e.g., tightening a screw, then if they have a tray table in spares, then if the company are happy to go with it taped up and whether that is legal, then they have to tape it. Just the simple act of writing up a defect and then clearing it without performing any actual maintenance can take 10 minutes. If a line engineer has to go back to the hangar for something, that can take a long time as there can be very restrictive speed limits around airports. Delays are a pain for everyone, crew, company, engineers, passengers, no one likes it, but with a complicated system like an aircraft it’s a fact of life. The paper trail required is the same for a simple fix as for a complicated fix, and it’s often the paper work that takes the time.
I’ve seen that just this month. Took 20 minutes to finish catering a widebody after the maintenance effort ended. Felt a lot like adding insult to injury, both to us and to the customers.
THere’s a difference between “only toilet completely unusable” and “only toilet has to be flushed via alternate means.” For the former we can’t fly farther than one hour with passengers aboard. For the latter there’s no limit as long as sufficient “alternate means” are supplied.
But would you as the pilot be comfortable making that distinction, would you decide only after talking to maintenance HQ, or would you want a mechanic to actually inspect the toilet and make a recommendation?
It’s primarily a commercial decision, not an engineering one. Who cares if the toilet doesn’t work properly? Some of the passengers maybe. It’d be like driving your car one day and finding the ashtray doesn’t close properly, you don’t need to take it to a mechanic to have someone tell you it’s ok to drive. All engineering need to tell you is that it can be deferred, and they can do that over the phone.
To answer directly, I’d be quite happy making that decision without engineering looking at the toilet as long as the company were happy with the slightly negative PR and engineering told me it could be deferred as “not safety of flight”.
“CASA”?