Narrative:

My crew was assigned to perform 'a' check on aircraft X at the maintenance facility located at the airport. One of my assignments was to inspect cargo fire bottle squibs for the expiration date. After conducting my visual inspection of the tags; I concluded that the date stamped on the squib tags appeared to be within limits. It has been brought to my attention that the cargo fire bottle squibs that I inspected were later found to be out of date. I have been informed by management that the squibs have been changed and are now up to date. I am willing to work with all parties to prevent recurrence of this event. I am including in this report suggestions that may prevent this occurrence from happening in the future: 1) continue to emphasize review of maintenance alert bulletins; 2) issue maintenance alert bulletins to mechanics requiring the stencil dates be clearly stamped in a legible manner; 3) elevating this work card to make it an rii item; 4) standardizing the stencil date format (e.g.; date for december 2008 would always be written '12/08;' and/or 5) changing the work card to require that the expiration date be listed on the card. Callback conversation with reporter revealed the following information: reporter stated the expiration dates stamped; or etched; on the metal tags attached to the cargo fire bottle squibs; are not uniform. Some tags have numbers while others use letters to indicate year and month. The number #7 can easily be read as a #1. Reporter stated he showed his manager some of the metal tags with the different markings and how difficult reading the letters and numbers can be. His manager agrees there should be a uniformed type of marking on these metal tags to improve the accuracy of determining expiration dates of the squibs.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: A mechanic is informed the cargo fire bottle squibs he checked on a B737-800 for being in limits; were actually out of date.

Narrative: My crew was assigned to perform 'A' Check on aircraft X at the Maintenance facility located at the airport. One of my assignments was to inspect cargo fire bottle squibs for the expiration date. After conducting my visual inspection of the tags; I concluded that the date stamped on the squib tags appeared to be within limits. It has been brought to my attention that the cargo fire bottle squibs that I inspected were later found to be out of date. I have been informed by management that the squibs have been changed and are now up to date. I am willing to work with all parties to prevent recurrence of this event. I am including in this report suggestions that may prevent this occurrence from happening in the future: 1) Continue to emphasize review of maintenance alert bulletins; 2) Issue maintenance alert bulletins to mechanics requiring the stencil dates be clearly stamped in a legible manner; 3) Elevating this work card to make it an RII item; 4) Standardizing the stencil date format (e.g.; date for December 2008 would always be written '12/08;' and/or 5) Changing the work card to require that the expiration date be listed on the card. Callback conversation with Reporter revealed the following information: Reporter stated the expiration dates stamped; or etched; on the metal tags attached to the cargo fire bottle squibs; are not uniform. Some tags have numbers while others use letters to indicate year and month. The number #7 can easily be read as a #1. Reporter stated he showed his Manager some of the metal tags with the different markings and how difficult reading the letters and numbers can be. His Manager agrees there should be a uniformed type of marking on these metal tags to improve the accuracy of determining expiration dates of the squibs.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of April 2012 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.