Been looking at old wiring diagrams from my first gig in 2012 and man we had it easy back then

Pulled a harness out of a 737 last Tuesday that had been re-spliced so many times it looked like a rat's nest. Trying to trace it through the manuals from 2018 and the new digital ones just don't match up. My old mentor used to say a good drawing was worth a thousand words. Now I'm standing there with three different schematics that all disagree. Anyone else feel like the new systems are way more complex than they need to be?

2 comments

2 Comments

skylerc861mo ago

Well, I gotta push back a little on the old days being easier. I started in 2009 and those older schematics had their own problems, like missing revisions and hand-drawn patches that nobody ever documented. The new digital systems are definitely more complex, but they give you the full picture if you know how to dig into them. Training and patience are the real issues, not the technology itself. Too many guys just want to glance at a diagram and fix it, but you have to learn the new system the same way you learned the old one.

troy4391mo ago

You said "training and patience are the real issues" and I get where you're coming from but honestly I think people are making this way too complicated. I've been doing this since 2005 and yeah the old schematics had issues but you could usually figure it out with a meter and some common sense. Now you gotta dig through layers of software menus just to find out if a sensor is even reading right. It's not that hard to learn but some of these new systems feel like they were designed by people who never had to fix anything in their life. I'm not saying it's impossible or anything I just think sometimes the simpler approach worked fine and we didn't need to reinvent the wheel.