"Mike" wrote in message
news:2Rrbk.459$713.307@trnddc03...
Nonsense. If you are human, and especially if you lack x-ray vision, you
can miss damage on a preflight.

The chances of any such 'invisible' damage being a safety of flight issue are
pretty much nil. Someone might crinkle a firewall with a wheelbarrow landing
or overstress the airframe, but the chances of that being a safety of flight
issue in the near term are next to nothing. But if someone bangs up a wing or
a tail against a hanger, flat spots a tire, or has a prop strike this is going
to show up during a proper pre-flight.

Obviously, you haven't seen some of the things I have seen. One of the more
tender, and more invisible spots on some airframes is where the horizontal
stabilizer connects to the fuze. Many designs allow a tremendous moment arm for
any non-balanced load on the stabilizer to stress the attachment points. This
shows up as cracked spars on Cessnas, and I have seen stressed and cracked
fittings from another airframe. How can this happen? Well on Cessnas it
happens from folks using improper procedures to back the plane into a parking
spot. It can also happen from innocent (but ignorant) bystanders, mowers,
animal activity, or any of thousands of other posibilities.

Also, you don't know what happened on the last flight. Excessively hard
landing? Botched manuver? These and countless other things can cause
difficult-to-detect damage to an airframe.

One list item: The standard for passing a preflight inspection is not
"safety of flight in the near term". I would hope that you would consider an
airplane not airworthy long before that.


So what trick do you use to get them to do the runup?

The most polite thing I can say is that was an unnecessary comment.

(I don't want this to turn into a flame war so you may have the last word.)

Vaughn