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Caught myself wiring a backup generator wrong for like 2 years straight
I was doing a routine inspection on a King Air 350 last Thursday in Wichita and noticed the emergency bus wasn't getting power during a test. Turned out I had been mixing up the ground and the sense wire on the voltage regulator this whole time. The tip-off was a senior tech named Dave who just watched me for a minute and said 'you know that's backwards, right?' Has anyone else had a moment where a simple wire swap was causing phantom issues for months?
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stellaperry16d ago
Not really seeing how this is that big of a deal unless you were having actual failures. A swapped ground and sense wire on a King Air voltage regulator? Come on. That's a pretty common setup and the system is forgiving enough that it probably just ran a little off. If you weren't throwing errors or burning stuff up, it was working good enough. Dave might have been showing off a bit. Unless you were getting intermittent power drops or weird voltage readings, I doubt it was causing phantom issues for months. Sometimes techs overthink these things.
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quinna8915d ago
Honestly, were you getting any weird voltage drops on the emergency bus during your preflight checks, or was it just dead silent across the board? Ngl, a swapped ground and sense wire could be pulling the regulator into a weird feedback loop, making it think the battery was fully charged when it wasn't. Dave probably caught it because he's seen that exact goof melt a bus bar on a old 200 model. Tbh, I'd trace every connection back to the plug on the voltage regulator after that, just to make sure you didn't cook a diode somewhere.
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