I understand your situation completely, best compromise for you is to save an item for a weather day and on your preflight write it up. Dont find the issue and talk about it with the mechanic for a week and then write it up on the weather day otherwise you will lose the game you are trying to avoid. Just make a mental note on something you find, "sliding door is making noise and needs adjusting." Then hold that to yourself and hopefully within a week or so a weather day will happen and you "discover it" on preflight. Write it up, he has to come in and fix it but the base isnt OOS because of it since the wx is junk.
Obviously as others have stated if its an issue that cant wait because common sense says it needs fixing right away and is a safety of flight issue then of course do that.
Is it the way its supposed to work? No. In a perfect world you find anything wrong, you write it up, every GOM is written that way and thats the answer you would give to anyone from the FAA asking. Unfortunately as you have found out some bases have a bad attitude on things. Now I dont disagree with the mechanic/base principle of not doing post it note mx, if it wrong write it up is a good first step, you unfortunately have a bad second step in the management frowning on it. I'm very lucky here that our program director has an aviation background so he wants things fixed when they happen and not dragging them out.
And again as other have stated, dont write up stupid stuff or at least ask the mechanic, some aircraft what you think is a problem is actually a feature! Just dont sweat the small stuff, you have a place you like that you are invested in, is it worth getting run off because you wrote up something small that was bothering you that could have waited to get worked in with a bigger maintenance event?
I'm lucky at my base we have a good mechanic and good relationship. If we notice something is getting ready to break or is getting worn out and we know its going to require parts that he does not have in stock we can work with him to order the parts we need and that way when a weather day happens and we write it up he already has the parts vs having to wait for them to come in. |