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Actually, I'm not entirely convinced that it is. It could very well be incorporated into a systems question. There's safety wire all over in an airplane- its on the landing gear, the prop, the engine compartment, and the list goes on... A lot of vital components are safetied- is it too much to ask of an applicant to know the basic concepts of why its done and how it works? I don't think so. Besides, I gaurantee that on more than one occasion while working as a CFI, a student will ask about it.
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There's a fine line between understanding how systems work, and being expected to know how to build the damn thing. It's knowing the principles of a system versus the mechanics.
Is this a CFI checkride, or an A&P checkride? So many things are safety-wired that one can't know each particular components proper safety wiring set.
It's like for our mission-checkrides. I get asked what the 14 algorithms are that the AGM-65 Maverick air-ground missile's brain uses to steer the missle correctly to the target? My answer? Who cares. While it's nice-to-know information, it has nothing to do with how I, as an operator, call-up/arm/fire the missile from the cockpit. In the cockpit, there's the particular switches used for normal setup/firing of the missile, a few troubleshooting techniques, but other than that, it either works or it don't. If one or more of the algorithms are screwed up, there's nothing I can do about it from the cockpit, and I don't build the darn things.
Same applies to "appropriate" airman knowlege. More power to someone if they take the time to learn the extra stuff, but to BUST them on it for lack of knowlege is pretty stupid, IMO.