Original Message

Things don't get written up because pilots don't want to make waves and the culture of some companies support this nonsense. It has been an aviation fact for ever, pilots fly the aircraft they are willing to accept. If the company culture is that faults are required to be written up, they tend to get written up. 

Even in companies with poor cultures the mechanic figure out which pilots will write up faults and treat these pilots in a different manner. When mechanics know you will document faults they take some type of positive action. For years I've told mechanic that if I think its broken I'll write the problem up. It becomes their problem to fix or to sign off the writeup as entered in error. It's not personal it's professional.

When I started in commerical aviation it was not uncommon to show up and have the pilot I was replacing hand me a note telling me about all the undocumented problems. It was an issue for our company that took time to overcome.