DAY 82 - 7 NOVEMBER 1990

DAY 82 - 7 NOVEMBER 1990
This is a day I could write a book about... Oh wait, I am writing a book!

I'm working on the Phase on 10, doing "zonals" for now. On some inspections, the instruction says "inspect this bolt for wear" then "inspect this linkage for signs of ..." etc, those would be specific item inspections. But today, I'm doing Zonals, which is literally "Inspect this zone" Sort of ignore the trees and look at the forest kind of thing. By switching things up, you tend to see different things, in theory.

We're also pulling all the cabin floor decking to do the 56 day inspection. That's when we clean out all the bilge areas under the flooring and inspect for corrosion. We start by snowing the whole area... Snow is the nickname we have for our aircraft cleaning solution applicator, which sprays suds sort of like a car wash nozzle. So we Snowed the bilges, then scrubbed them out with some aircraft scrub pads, and then rinsed it with a garden hose. After letting most of the water run out the low point drains, we went in with my shop vac and just sucked out all the remaining water. Worked really slick... until the vacuum burned up!

No Shit! It went from working great, to Blue Sparks... to a really bright orange glow, to lots of smoke before anyone could get to shut it down.So now next time I get a break I'll get to take it apart and see if its something I can fix. That's always fun!

But Wait, there's MORE! Rush, our NDI tech found a flaw in the aft rotor head on 07. Ok, get this. The defect is only a 40 on the scale, and a FAIL is a 55 on the scale. So... now we keep flying our helo with a known crack in our rotor head, and we have to do NDI every 10 flight hours now, instead of every 25 flight hours.

Now, let me be clear here. We KNOW we have a crack in the rotor head. We have our own NDI tech, which normally we wouldn't have one at all, but we have our own tech, because there were some aircraft that crashed earlier, actually during our first detachment.

We didn't fly most of that cruise in fact because of that other incident. So, My Aircrew know people on the other aircrew that died, because of a rotor head that failed in flight. We now KNOW we have a crack in the head, and they're telling us, essentially "oh, that's not a big crack, keep flying, you'll be fine".

What that really means, is that someone somewhere is working on an improved rotor head, but due to our commitment to move cargo, we'll have to take our chances and hope we can keep flying until the new heads get delivered out to us. Talk about a warm fuzzy feeling right? You got to love this job some days...

We secured at 0730, ate some fine Navy chow, and hit the racks at around 0830.

Carlin gets in front of the Camera - It Was Scary!

So, after I posted the last video, of the folder full of letters, I got a lot of comments of "But what do You LOOK LIKE?"

Well, remember, you did ask for this :)

To me, the irony, that I shoot video of people for a living, and have almost zero footage of myself is kind of funny. Will see what this does for my ratings! ha ha

Thanks for your support!
Carlin
Follow me on Twitter! @carlincomm

Remember to leave Comments, both here on the blog, and over at YouTube for the clips :)

DAY 66 - 22 OCTOBER 1990

DAY 66 - 22 OCTOBER 1990
Halloween is in 9 days, some of the crew are starting to talk about doing something fun, but we're kind of limited on options!

We're doing the same upper flight controls inspection that we just did a few days ago, this time on the other helo. This time when we went to put it all back together, we ran into one pin that just would not go back into the hole. Its like the holes shifted or something. Take it apart, look, try again. After a while we just stopped on that and worked on the rest of the inspection and figured we'd come back to it later. Other wise you'd waste the entire shift and have nothing to show for it right?

We managed to change all 6 tires in less than an hour, which is a bit slower than what NASCAR pits can do, but we have a bit different rules! For one, we can only jack one axel at a time, so you change two tires, put the helo back down, then move over to the next axel. For another, we have the aircraft tied down with 10 chains, so as you jack it, you have to keep an eye on the chains and losten or tighten them as you go. Its got the makings of a 3 Stooges episode right there!

Tie down chains are one of those things you just get used to, but they're always a giant pain in the ass. I use some air tools, paint gun, air drills, air sanders, etc. When I'm painting, I have 2 air hoses, one for my paint gun, and a breathing hose for my resperator. I'm constantly stopping what I'm doing to go back and untangle my hoses or cords from the tie down chains, plus all the other stuff we have there. There is only a few feet beside the helos anyway, and we have gear and spare parts and tool boxes stacked in every possible spare foot of space. Plus the chains are just purpose made to be easy to trip on I think! Sure, we know where they are, we always park and tie down at the same place each night, but I think probably ever crewmember has tripped at least once. And the floor is coated with this really nice non skid surface which just hurts! Its not good for pants either...

The word for today is "Ass-Jack". I remember back in Boot Camp, we'd have an official Navy word of the day, and its definition. We would all have to copy it into our notebooks and know what it was and what it meant. It was something we could be drilled on, and was another good excuse for doing push ups. Anyway, someone today just started saying Ass Jack for no reason, and we just all started laughing. For the sake of a definition, it would have to be a Jack Ass that was more backwards than normal, right?

One of our pilots is transfering, will be leaving us tomorrow, so someone got the idea to tie him up to the flight deck and then grease him up. Now keeping in mind that pilots are officers, I'm pretty sure this is probably a bad idea, but it seemed funny at the time! I kind of think there must have been other officers in on this, right? Anyway, by the time it was done, he had been stripped of his flight suit, covered in aircraft grease, and then soaked in ice water. Too funny!

Tomorrow is another Airhead, but with a twist. We're still working on the phase on 10, so only 07 is flying today. The other thing is there is not going to be a beach det sent, so it must be a small one.

Send a Free Message to our Troops

This is easy, will take you probably a minute to do, but it will mean a lot to the person who receives it. I know, I've gotten things like this, and it helps. Thank you!
Carlin

The Folder

A big part of this book will be the actual letters from people back home. For anyone not familiar with the "Any Service Member" mail project, during Desert Shield / Desert Storm, any person in the US could write a letter, and address it to "Any Service Member" and it would then be delivered at random to someone in the war zone. My ship was one of the main distribution points for this mail, we used our 2 helos to move the boxes of mail from shore to ship, then ship to ship. Eventually it got to the point there was so much mail that the other ships asked us to stop bringing so much, they didn't have room for it all. I made it a point to grab a hand full of letters at the end of each shift, sit down and read then. At first it was just to pass the time, and I'd write back as I had time. Eventually I noticed there were a lot of people asking the same questions, so I wrote up a news letter that I would send out to the people I had picked out of the mail bag. I decided to stop when I had hit 100 people, it seemed like a nice easy number. A few weeks later, I started getting personal replies back from the people had sent letters to. In all, I had about 50 people who replied to me directly at least once, out of the 100, and there were many who wrote back regularly. I had some that I kept in contact several years after Desert Storm in fact, and I got to meet a few of them in person. How cool is that?

Anyway, I just wanted to include a quick over view of how many letters there really were. This video runs about 12 minutes or so, I just set the camera up and let it run as I pulled a few letters out, just to give you an idea.

Thanks for following along!
Carlin
@carlincomm

DAY ONE - 18 August, 1990 - Here we go!

DAY ONE
18 AUGUST, 1990

Officially, the day began with a 0400 muster at the hanger. But for most of us, the night before was spent packing our stuff or partying one last time. The helos were first loaded with the maintenance equipment and supplies, which was flown out first, followed by the crew. We landed on board the USNS KILAUEA )T-AE-26) by 0610, which was just off shore. The boat then pulled into Guam by about 0730, and we had breakfast.

I spent the morning setting up my TV, VCR, and computer in the helo detachment's lounge spaces, then we started setting up the hanger and work spaces. We had to have everything stowed and or secured prior to pulling out of port, as the water is usually somewhat choppy around Guam, and things tend to fly around when the ship starts rocking. For those who have never been on a ship, it is like being in an big earthquake. Things can slide or fly around if not tied down, causing all sorts of problems. We had some lunch around noon, then some of the crew went out shopping for last minute things, etc. The ship secured liberty at 1500, and mustered to be sure everyone was back. Dinner around 1700, then we finished moving things around and getting all settled in, and cast off by 1900.

At 2000 the ship had a pizza night in the mess decks, sort of a ships social night. There is also a popcorn night, a nachos night, usually at least two nights a week. Forget everything you may know about US NAVY ships, of which this was origionally. It has a crew less than half of what would normally be required for a ship of its size and mission, because the civilian crew normally stays with the ship for many years, rather that getting out after 4 years which is common in the Navy. This means that spaces are not so confined, enabled us to have two man staterooms, rather than "open bay" with around 150 people, bunks 3 high, and locker space that would have high school kids screaming. We had all the hot water we could use in the showers, did our own laundry in normal washers and dryers, and ate steak, pizza, and some of the biggest lobsters most of us had ever seen.

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Stay tuned!
In the mean time, leave me some comments!
Thanks!
@carlincomm