How Many Deferrals is "Normal" at your Shop?
 

What's a typical number of maintenance deferrals you can expect on any given flight? What would you consider a lot?

0 is normal. 2 or 3 is a lot.

Zero to one is normal. Bearing in mind that the majority are cabin deferrals (seat-back, foot rest, seat power, lav sink, etc).

Three would be a lot. Anything more than that is typically piggy-backs, required by other deferrals.

Thanks. Excluding cabin/nef deferrals, we're routinely well in excess of those numbers.

2-3 on average, but it has gotten worse lately. I flew one with 13 the other day, including NEFs and CDLs.

Come to Brown where 10 is common. Some are nothing burgers like broken locks or lights in the back, but many are more interesting like pneumatic, autopilot/throttles, fuel system, APU, ACARS, or external parts of the aircraft missing. It gets to the point where you can have multiple ECAM messages that your should ignore while hopefully catching the ones that are a “new” problem to be dealt with. Life’s an adventure, especially here.

Sounds really familiar! Trying to piece all the interacting deferrals together for their operational impacts becomes a project.

I'm curious , who do you fly for?

Jolly Fats Weehawkin.

This is also accurate for United

Might be helpful to include the plane you’re on. I imagine it’s going to vary from a WB to a NB?

We had the rubber gasket thing at the bottom of the Airbus stick coming off recently. It uses a special nylon type of rope that holds it in place.

The mechanic came to the plane and said well I’ll look up and see if we can just defer the side stick, since there’s two. He was dead serious and I just played along and told him that he should go do that and let us know.

they’ll defer anything if they can go back inside and watch whatever was on the TV

Meh. You could just engage the AP and setup for an ILS and autoland. Who needs sticks?

When you only have one HYD system, that's when you start to worry in a bus.

Holy mackal. That’s pretty good considering that at my regional it’s not uncommon to have 2-3, sometimes 4-5, especially with our older 700’s. Every now and then you come across a plane with 5-7. Those are always fun to brief.

lately I've seen the same one on lots of planes, interior cabin lighting system etc. Its like a mx POI got it in himself to make these better or something.
Other than that it's more the norm to not have any.
WN

I can recall a story and video I've seen of a Mesa CRJ9 flight deck covered in orange stickers, so much so they ran out of places to put them and started slapping them on the flight deck door.

Must've been 25+ but, how many of those were NEFs, I don't know.

Agreed. Rarely do I see more than one, and usually it’s a nonessential cabin item. When the -300’s were about to go away I flew several that had multiple items but like Hoover wrote having none is the norm at WN.

Meh….I flew a 747-400F that had over 30 MEL stickers scattered about….all but 2 of them were inop power drive units(the electrically powered wheels that move the cargo containers) on the cargo decks…and a dozen or more are moving every container so it’s not even noticeable. It’s all in the details.