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Reading an old FAA report on a 737 autopilot fault
I was looking through some old NTSB reports online and found one from a 2005 incident. The report said a faulty autopilot servo caused a series of uncommanded pitch changes. What got me was the root cause. It wasn't a bad chip or a broken wire. It was a tiny amount of moisture, less than a teaspoon, that had seeped into the housing over two years and finally caused a short. The plane had passed all its regular checks. It makes you think about how something so small can hide for so long. Has anyone else run into a problem where the cause was way simpler than you expected?
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sagesingh1mo ago
Echoing @jadeg81 here, a literal puddle undid two years of perfect flights.
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jadeg812mo ago
That "less than a teaspoon" detail is wild. It's like the plane's biggest enemy wasn't a storm or a mechanical failure, but a spilled drink from two years ago that nobody cleaned up.
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