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.
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.
posted by Carlin at
9:14 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home