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Third time I found a cannon plug torqued past spec on a 737 and nobody wants to hear about it
Last Tuesday I was doing a routine pitot static check on a 737-800 in Austin and when I went to break the cannon plug loose it took both hands and a strap wrench. Spec says hand tighten plus a quarter turn, this thing was way past that and the shell was already showing hairline cracks near the coupling ring. I've now found three of these in the past 14 months on different airframes, and every time the flight crew swears they never touched it. The real problem is that over-torquing crushes the insert and you start getting intermittent pins that pass a continuity check on the ground and fail at altitude. Anybody else seeing this pattern or am I just unlucky with the planes I get assigned?
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pat_carter5d ago
How many of us have gorilla arms and don't even know it? I've caught myself cranking stuff way past snug more than once, so maybe some of these plugs got hit by a guy who skipped his coffee and thought tighter equals safer. The cracked shell is your tell though, that's not from hand tightening, somebody went after it with a tool.
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