> but you can't fly a plan that 'missing a part'
It’s a great story, but I assure you there is a pretty high percentage of airplanes flying with missing parts and systems placarded as INOP in both military and civilian aviation.
It’s a great story, but I assure you there is a pretty high percentage of airplanes flying with missing parts and systems placarded as INOP in both military and civilian aviation.
To reiterate, you CANNOT fly an airplane with an undocumented missing part. If the part is documented in the logbook as removed, and it is acceptable to fly that way, then it is not missing.
I have been building and maintaining commercial aircraft for a living for 30 years. What is your experience?
Because you asked, I’ve been flying, owning, and overseeing the maintenance of our aircraft for 27 years, including understanding my freedoms and obligations as a pilot and as an operator with regards to the legality of dispatch for imperfect aircraft under both normal operations and under special flight (aka “ferry”) permits. I have spent a lot of time across those three decades both socially and in continuing education courses/seminars with both GA and commercial flight crews and A&P/IAs.
There were posters everywhere about "extra parts" they called FOD.
It stands for foreign object debris, and means any physical thing out of place where it may cause damage or injury. Because of the nature of jet engines, basically anything can be FOD depending on where you put it.