Monitoring pressure and temperature in addition to lubricants and components are all important parts of maintaining any hydraulic system. If you don’t perform these then you are likely to get issues with failures.
Unfortunately this is the type of information that can get lost amongst productivity numbers and data. It’s known as in-attentional blindness and it can happen regularly. Unfortunately it’s also the type of human behaviour that can cause fatal incidents.
It’s something that can and does occur, even to people like airline pilots who can become so fixated on why something isn’t happening, that they don’t realise what is happening. When they finally catch on to what’s going on, then it might be too late and their plane’s nosedive is no longer recoverable. In fact, there is a case of a plane going down due to the failure of one light on the dashboard. The commercial pilots became so interested in why it wasn’t working that they came to a sorry end with over 100 passengers.
This is why visual inspections are important. Lights can get burnt out and gauges can get stuck. Oil levels need to be seen and in many cases an attentive individual can prevent a failure from occurring.
No matter how sophisticated your hydraulic machine is, there needs to be some scheduled and documented procedures established as part of the monitoring program.
Now that we know that engineers can get transfixed on one issue, even when the root of the problem lies elsewhere, it’s important to know that sometimes just a fresh set of eyes on the matter is enough to solve it. Some failures that are just about to happen, just need fresh eyes on them to prevent them from occurring.
Developing systems for better monitoring and maintenance is never something that is wasted time. It is something that can avoid hydraulic breakdown and component failure.