Date: 201809
Aircraft: B757 Undifferentiated or Other Model
Operator: Air Carrier
Operating under: Part 121
Flight plan: IFR
Mission: Passenger
Flight phase: Parked
Reporter organization: Air Carrier
Reporter function: Captain
Reporter qualification: Flight Crew Air Transport Pilot (ATP); Flight Crew Instrument; Flight Crew Multiengine
Human factors: Communication Breakdown; Workload
Anomaly: Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy
Detector: Person Flight Crew
Result: General None Reported / Taken
Contributing factors: Company Policy; Manuals
Primary problem: Company Policy

Narrative: The maintenance section of the flight paperwork has a 'MEL/CDL' section; a 'Carry Forward' section; and a 'Long Term Carry Forward' section. According to Flight Manual; 'carried items not scheduled to receive maintenance action for at least 30 days are classified as long-term carried items and are only listed at the end of the Log History.' However; Maintenance has a different definition of what constitutes a long term item: 'The limits for a long term item are 1;500 hours OR 200 cycles OR 100 days. These are the limits that should be reflected in the Flight manual.' The Flight manager was copied on the action item and the language was supposed to be corrected; but that never happened. Why? Where is the follow-through?There are still pages and pages of entries in the regular (short term) carry forward section that belong in the long term section. We're talking about things like fuselage dents that are years old! Why are these in the wrong section; or maybe more importantly; why are we seeing them at all? By cluttering up the maintenance paperwork with inconsequential items; we're being 'trained' to just skim over that stuff; and that's a problem because we might miss something important that's buried in there. Deviance is being normalized: The carry forward section is no longer useful because it contains too much stuff that shouldn't be there. How about we pay someone to go through these things and re-categorize them so they show up in the proper section or not at all?The answers to these questions (and many others) always seem to involve some component of 'I.T. issue' or 'incomplete programming' or 'it's a low priority on the I.T. list'. So I ask you: Are we an I.T. company that operates airplanes on the side; or are we an airline that needs better support from I.T.? When Ops responds to [reports] with comments like 'Unfortunately I have no control over the quality of the work that the IT team produces;' as they did to my [report]; that's a real problem. Who; exactly; does have control over the I.T. people?Or how about this response to my [report]: 'This was a request made by Flight operations during the initial development of the SCEPTRE logbook design specification. So when this came up on the priority list the developers made the programing change. None of the current Flight Operations team supports this change. We have requested that this be removed from the Log History. We have also requested to review the future development list to prevent surprises like this moving forward.' Again; it appears that Flight Ops is at the mercy of I.T. Do they support us; or do we support them? Who's driving the ship here?Is the ELB [Electronic Log Book] program considered complete? Have we reached a 90% status and called it good enough? What's it going to take to get the maintenance information that's presented to pilots back to the state it was in years ago? There is still work to be done; but from my perspective it appears no one is doing it.




Synopsis: B757 Captain reported that the Electronic Log Book is cluttered with Carry Forward items; causing critical items to be missed.