Overheard a pilot blaming the box for his own bad data entry

Was doing a line check yesterday at the hangar and heard one of the pilots tell the lead tech that the FMS was garbage because it kept giving him a bad flight plan. I pulled the quick log and found he typed in the wrong runway identifier, twice. Same guy who swore the transponder was broken last month when he forgot to switch it from standby. I get it, the boxes can be finicky, but at some point we gotta stop letting the cockpit crew make us the fall guys. How do you guys handle the blame game without burning bridges with the pilots?

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jesser7923d ago

Man, this takes me back to when I used to do IT support and a guy swore his mouse was dead when he'd just unplugged it to dust the desk. We finally rigged a sticky note on the monitor that said "check the obvious first" and he still got mad at us for being condescending. At some point you just have to save the log files, show them the timestamp, and let the data do the talking without making it personal.