It's All About The Little Things

When most people think about aircraft maintenance they think of a guy or gal changing a tire or working on an engine. Indeed I will bet that when all you mechanics out there explain your job to others you tell them about tires, engines, checks, etc. The envision you standing there with grease on your hands and clothing, big wrench in hand working on "The Big Part". Of course a good deal of our job does in fact fit that description.

Last night I was changing a brake on a 737-300. For all of you in the know it is time consuming with something like 10 bolts and nuts holding the stupid thing on. I think we can all agree that a break is a "Big Part". The thing about changing brakes and tires is that I am convinced that most pilots do not even notice that there are new tires and brakes on the plane when they do their walk around. They do, however, notice that the windscreen is dirty or that their map light is inop. This is simply a truth of human nature, we usually only notice the things that directly affect us. It is up to us mechanics to save the pilots from this way of thinking. Our job is to continue to change the big and small parts, even the parts that no one will ever notice in order to keep the plane in an airworthy condition.

That covers one aspect of the importance of all the little things. The next thing is the "Pet Peeve". The pet peeve is the one thing that a mechanic checks on every airplane. Each mech has his own thing that he checks, for me it's the floor mounted CB light in the flight deck and the screws that always come loose on the Classic Series Flap Track Canoe Fairings. Now, I always checked these things and never really thought about it until one night when I was working with Just Jim and noticed that he was cleaning the inside of the landing light lens for the fixed/turnoff lights. When I asked him about it he told me that every mechanic here has that one thing that he does to every plane that they work on. The one thing may seem small but when taken as a group of 1200 mechanics those one things add up. That he explained to me is the reason why our planes are in such good shape everyone does their one thing and in the end the plane is fully covered.

I believe that most guys here in our station do that same thing. As a matter of fact for all those who keep asking me why I continuously write up bad floor mounted CB lights I say go find your own pet peeve and leave me alone. We all know guys who change seat back pocket springs or clean and re-stripe the landing gear down lock indicators so my CB light is not too big of a deal.

Also in closing; a while back I worked a whole lot of midnight shift OT with one of the more senior guys here, lets call him Maybe-Maybe. Maybe-Maybe and I would always try to work together because we had similar working styles and got jobs done fairly quickly. Well Maybe-Maybe had a theory he called "keep 'um happy". What this meant was after all the tire and engine crap was done we would go upstairs and do the windscreens, clean the cockpit, do the reading lights and any little stupid cabin items that the crew would be sure to notice. His theory being that if all those little things were done we would get no gate calls in the morning (remember when you used to have to go to gate calls on the planes you actually worked on?). The funny thing is that it worked, we hardly got any gate calls on our planes. There is a lesson in there somewhere...