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Found out a 737 has about 175 miles of wiring, and I've been crawling around maybe 200 feet of it
I was killing time on a break between tasks and pulled up an old Boeing maintenance training doc someone left in the shop, and it said a 737 has roughly 175 miles of wiring in it. I sat there doing the math on a napkin and figured I've probably touched maybe 200 feet of that total over the last six years, working mostly on the flight deck and the forward avionics bay. It kind of messed with my head a little, because you spend eight hours tracing one bundle behind the MEC panel and you feel like you've seen the whole plane. Turns out you've seen a hallway in a house. Made me wonder how many squawks get signed off without anyone ever laying eyes on the actual run that's causing the problem. Anyway, curious what most of you end up actually working on day to day, is it the same few bays over and over or do you get spread out more? Just wondering if my 200 feet is normal or if I've been living in a closet this whole time.
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felix_miller509d ago
Keeps reminding me of how we all do this in every job, not just planes. My cousin is a plumber and he says the same thing about old buildings, you learn your six blocks of pipe and you know them like your own hands, but the whole city runs on miles of stuff you will never touch. The doc says 175 miles but nobody on earth has walked all of it, not even the people who built the thing. We just trust the parts we can't see because the plane keeps flying, and most days that works fine. It only stops working when a wire in some run nobody has looked at in ten years picks that week to chafe through. So your 200 feet is probably normal, most of us live in a closet and just call it the whole house.
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