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Hit 10,000 flight hours on a single panel mount connector last month
It was a D-sub on a King Air that I've been swapping cards in and out of since 2018, and the pins still had proper retention force. Has anyone else kept close tabs on connector cycle life or am I just weird about it?
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burns.jenny9d ago
Proud of you for tracking that. I'm over here celebrating when my seatbelt buckle lasts past month two without jamming. Guess we all have our weird aviation obsessions.
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faith_king9d ago
Tracking cycle life on a connector is just overthinking a part that's designed to last way longer than that. Those D-subs are built tough and 10,000 cycles is barely breaking a sweat for most quality panel mounts. Real world failures usually happen from bent pins or corrosion, not from hitting some magic number on a counter.
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clairen859d ago
Heard a guy at the hangar last week swearing he'd worn out a D-sub after only 8,000 cycles, but turns out he was counting each test plug insertion as five separate cycles. Reminds me of that old saying about how statistics don't matter if you're measuring the wrong thing, which is probably why @faith_king is right about bent pins being the real problem. Your seatbelt buckle sounds like it has its own personality though, Jenny.
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