Been fighting with a Garmin G5000 autopilot for weeks until I ignored the manual

Everyone says to follow the troubleshooting flowcharts step by step, but after three days of chasing phantom servo faults on a King Air, I just disconnected the pitch axis trim switch completely (per a retired avionics guy's tip). Problem vanished. Has anyone else had better luck stepping outside the rigid diagnostic trees?

2 comments

2 Comments

fiona98514d ago

Oh man, I read something similar from a guy who used to work on Falcon 900s. He said sometimes the factory flowcharts are written by engineers who never actually had to fix a plane in a muddy hangar at 2 AM. In my experience, there's a big difference between what's technically correct on paper and what works in the real world. I've seen people waste days swapping perfectly good servos based on those rigid trees when the real issue was a pinched wire or a bad ground somewhere random. That trim switch trick sounds like exactly the kind of "dirty" troubleshooting that saves your sanity. Your mileage may vary of course, but I've heard from a few folks now that the G5000 likes to throw faults on anything related to pitch trim when the system is having a mood.

jamie_carter8714d ago

Man, I had a G5000 in a King Air last fall that was throwing pitch trim faults like candy on Halloween. Spent three days following the factory flowchart, swapped the trim actuator, the servo, even the control module. Customer is staring at the bill getting bigger. Finally found a chafed wire behind the avionics bay panel where some zip tie had been too tight. Five dollar fix. So yeah, that trim switch trick sounds like gold to me.