Narrative:

I met the crew coming off and they told me about a maintenance issue of brake degrade message on landing that went away when they got into taxiway. They wrote it up and maintenance just arrived to work on it. I got my stuff on plane and dealt with a few other gate agent issues then I spoke with and helped out maintenance guy to pump brakes for his brake check. He had said he could not MEL it because there was no sign of which brake transducer might be an issue if that even was the issue. So he was going to proceed to complete the maintenance task to test brakes and no sign of leakage and send it on its way. I told him we were going to ZZZZ and it might not turn out good if we get the same issue on landing in the international out station. He said he did what he could; had to and signed it off. That seemed like a fair assessment to make sure the brakes functioned for the next flight seeing there seemed to be no trend. So we proceeded to ZZZZ. Upon landing we also got the brake degrade message after the 100 kts inhibition and down to taxi speed it went away. I relayed to the first officer about our course and asked him to ACARS maintenance when workload permitted because I'd be dealing with gate agents and trying to find a communications means to maintenance control; dispatch and operations. The communications happened and was finally told it'd be an hour or so for contract maintenance to arrive.contract maintenance arrived and I gathered really quickly that our maintenance control had just told contract maintenance to ops check it good and send us on our way. Well; that's where I had the issue. I called maintenance control back a 3rd time to let them know my concerns of the safety of the flight since it was a brake degrade upon landing for the 2nd flight in a row. The maintenance controller put pressure on me by telling me of another plane the day prior with the brake degrade that flew 4 flights and got to ZZZ and was getting worked on finally. I took that as the final straw of safety and pressure and a long duty day and the chain was going to be broken by me. I refused the flight and told maintenance they could do their job and I was going to do my job. The contract maintenance refused to sign off the write up as he had issues with the situation as well. I believe I did the correct thing in this situation by putting the safety of the flight first before the pressures of the operations. It is sad to think that we have created a culture now that a captain will refuse a flight for safety and the operations are most likely going to just take that plane that needs to be fixed and then test flown and pass it onto another crew; most likely; to fly it. I hope that is not what happened in this case but I don't know for sure. I just wanted to file this as soon as possible because I know for myself that how I felt as far as being ignored and pressured by the operations over safety bothered me to my very core. If I am wrong in this situation I would like to know why. Realize that the cost that I'm sure the company will blame me for; for the flight and rebooking and putting passengers in hotels could have all been saved tenfold by taking the fortitude in ZZZ to do the maintenance correctly the first time and not just kicking the plane onto the next flight. I realize this can be done with many maintenance write ups. I just don't feel all write ups should or can be ops check ok. We are all told about the big picture but sometimes those of us working the front line might be listened to sometimes because safety will not be compromised ever by me.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: EMB-145 Captain reported receiving a 'BRAKE DEGRADE' message on landing that went away when they got to taxi speed.

Narrative: I met the crew coming off and they told me about a maintenance issue of brake degrade message on landing that went away when they got into taxiway. They wrote it up and Maintenance just arrived to work on it. I got my stuff on plane and dealt with a few other gate agent issues then I spoke with and helped out maintenance guy to pump brakes for his brake check. He had said he could not MEL it because there was no sign of which brake transducer might be an issue if that even was the issue. So he was going to proceed to complete the Maintenance task to test brakes and no sign of leakage and send it on its way. I told him we were going to ZZZZ and it might not turn out good if we get the same issue on landing in the international out station. He said he did what he could; had to and signed it off. That seemed like a fair assessment to make sure the brakes functioned for the next flight seeing there seemed to be no trend. So we proceeded to ZZZZ. Upon landing we also got the brake degrade message after the 100 kts inhibition and down to taxi speed it went away. I relayed to the FO about our course and asked him to ACARS Maintenance when workload permitted because I'd be dealing with gate agents and trying to find a communications means to Maintenance control; dispatch and operations. the communications happened and was finally told it'd be an hour or so for contract Maintenance to arrive.Contract Maintenance arrived and I gathered really quickly that our maintenance control had just told contract maintenance to ops check it good and send us on our way. Well; that's where I had the issue. I called maintenance control back a 3rd time to let them know my concerns of the safety of the flight since it was a brake degrade upon landing for the 2nd flight in a row. The maintenance controller put pressure on me by telling me of another plane the day prior with the brake degrade that flew 4 flights and got to ZZZ and was getting worked on finally. I took that as the final straw of safety and pressure and a long duty day and the chain was going to be broken by me. I refused the flight and told maintenance they could do their job and I was going to do my job. The contract maintenance refused to sign off the write up as he had issues with the situation as well. I believe I did the correct thing in this situation by putting the safety of the flight first before the pressures of the operations. It is sad to think that we have created a culture now that a captain will refuse a flight for safety and the operations are most likely going to just take that plane that needs to be fixed and then test flown and pass it onto another crew; most likely; to fly it. I hope that is not what happened in this case but I don't know for sure. I just wanted to file this ASAP because I know for myself that how I felt as far as being ignored and pressured by the operations over safety bothered me to my very core. If I am wrong in this situation I would like to know why. Realize that the cost that I'm sure the company will blame me for; for the flight and rebooking and putting passengers in hotels could have all been saved tenfold by taking the fortitude in ZZZ to do the maintenance correctly the first time and not just kicking the plane onto the next flight. I realize this can be done with many maintenance write ups. I just don't feel all write ups should or can be ops check ok. We are all told about the big picture but sometimes those of us working the front line might be listened to sometimes because safety will not be compromised ever by me.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.