BLEED VALVE FAILURE: I GET THE DAY OFF

All was going according to plan for our trip to HOG when, after consulting the aircraft log book, we noticed our maintenance people did not sign off a bleed valve failure snag that the previous inbound crew wrote up. Let me explain what a bleed valve is first of all. Some compressed air is "bled" off the compressor section of our engines and is used to pressurize the aircraft, anti-ice our engine inlets as well as other uses. We then consulted our MEL (Minimum Equipment List which let's us know if we can safely complete a flight with a particular piece of equipment broken our a system which may not be working properly). Since we need BOTH valves to be functioning if flying in KNOWN icing conditions (according to what the MEL says) and there were reports of icing in cloud over Toronto, we legally could not take off. Our engines would not have been safely anti-iced. After an hour of himming and hawing, maintenance decided that the airplane could not be fixed due to lack of parts and we would have to take another aircraft. That would add another 2 hours delay to unload passengers and their bags, tow the replacement aircraft from the other side of the airport then re board everyone and everything again. That would now mean a departure time of 2100 putting us into YYZ at 0630 as well as exceeding our duty day. Crew scheduling, faced with this dilemma began calling for a replacement crew. One was quickly found and soon I was in the car driving home for another week off.
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