It happened at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO, and I certainly could be misremembering and/or had been misinformed. The altitude there is around 6,000 feet.
I’ll try to remember to ask my sister when I talk to her next, but she’s traveling around for the next week (on leave then for business), so no promises.
I have a vague recollection that the Air Force Academy had some problems with a couple of gliders like this one (a Stemme S10 two-place side-by-site motorglider) - may have caused them to be grounded for a while. Details unknown.
Would it be accurate to suppose, then, that when you see something that usually gets deferred, that you try to flag it for correction before it reaches the point of actually being necessary to repair/correct?
Thank you for your replies, everyone. I’ve never been one to fear flying, but it’s nice to know that a preflight checklist is adhered to. (As a former submariner, I used to grouse about our extensive preunderway checklists and all the silly little things we had to check–but all it takes is one serious casualty compounded by several of those “silly little things” to send the boat to the seafloor. This is why our safety record parallels that of commercial aviation.)
That’s a cool link to the preflight inspection checklist, LSLGuy. Especially the lightning damage. They look like bullet holes!
And thank you, Broomstick, for the link to the Pit thread about the airport vandalism. That’s scary stuff.
In case anyone is interested, the preflight checklist for an R22 can be found here.
The link is to a page that contains a downloadable Word document.
I once rented a Citabria, and on preflight noticed some twigs sticking out from a seam in the cowl. I called the maintenance guys, and they removed the cowling, and pulled out several handfuls of bird’s nest material that had packed into the oil cooler duct.
The idea is that you “write a defect up” as soon as you notice it. Engineering then looks at it and decides whether it can be deferred or not. Part of the decision making process involves the MEL or minimum equipment list which specifies what defects may be carried, when the defect must be fixed, and what the effect is on the operation. As an example, in our company, a broken weather radar may be deferred provided the aircraft is not flown into areas of forecast thunderstorm activity. Further to this, some items may simply have no effect at all on the aircraft’s safety and may be deferred to be fixed at the company’s convenience. Or it may be something that is currently within limits (a fatigue crack for example*) but which must be checked periodically.
So defects are noticed, written up, and investigated. Sometimes they’re fixed straight away, or they may be required to be fixed within a certain time frame or they may be fixed when convenient.
Ultimately if the pilot in command is not happy with a defect, regardless of the legalities, s/he can refuse to take the aircraft until it is fixed.
If you are renting a plane, also worth mentioning is that during the walk you are also looking for pre-existing abuse caused by the previous flights. Kind of like an apartment rental, when you fly you sign off that the airplane is in good condition. A lot of minor things, like missing instrument knobs, missing flight manual, skid-damaged tires, bent antennas, and such are things to notice so that the FBO doesn’t bill you for the pre-existing damage.
I once found that, on an icy day, the previous pilot of a C152 had used an auto ice-scraper on the flimsy plastic windows of the airplane, scraping and gouging the shit out of the windscreen. No way was I going to sign off on that, and the FBO was very eager to identify and chase the pilot down to account for the negligence 
And one must always make sure to check that the maintenance guys removed the duct tape from the Pitot-static ports…! Human error and stupidity is by far the most risky thing in/around an airplane, IMHO (IANApilot though!)
Flying from Calgary to Seattle last December, we were all onboard the plane when someone (either a pilot or a groundcrew worker) noticed a hydraulic leak from somewhere. We all had to disembark while they looked at it, and they decided the plane was not airworthy. Luckily they had another plane of the same type at the airport with no scheduled flights, so they were able to simply switch it out and get the new plane ready; the whole thing took maybe an hour and a half. It costs them a heck of a lot less in passenger compensation/future sales/cost of preparing a plane for departure than it does to crash into a mountain and have to pay out the lawsuit settlements!
