Congratulations SWA Huge Quarterly Profits! Now What To Do With The $$?

WOW!!! We at SWA made over 400 million bucks last quarter! I say we because it is truly a team effort to make such an amount of money. For those of us who work or who have worked at an airline know that it takes everyone doing the right thing for the company to succeed. I know that I worked hard and I know that the company appreciates those of us who work hard so that SWA and all of us can enjoy the good years.

The thing I was wondering is how SWA is going to spend that money in a way that can help us poor Mechs at OAK MX. I know that SWA is a frugal airline and I know that half of that 400 mil is going straight to the bank. I have a few suggestions for items we could use in OAK that would make our jobs easier and that in some cases have been a long time coming.

1.     A lift truck. We have been needing a lift truck since I got here in 1996. We are an airline that operates in 20 minute intervals. The 20 minute turn gets real hard to do when we mechanics have to fish around for a JLG lift or some kind of stand just to change a Logo Light or Nav Light.

This style is good. A nice lift bed with an air hose on a flat drivable platform. The one that I am more familiar with is a pick up truck with a scissor lift in place of the bed. Very handy items and could cost about $30k tops.

2.     Daniels Kit. A Daniels Kit is a collection of pin pushers, crimpers, wire strippers and extractors used to repair wiring and cannon plugs. These things are expensive I know, but the planes are getting more and more electronic. As a result of the reliance on electronics more and more wiring problems arise. We have been making do with plastic pushers and throw away extractors. A real Daniels Kit would be a nice addition to our tool room.



There are only two down sides to having a Daniels Kit:

     a.   They cost a lot of money some thing like $10k.

     b.   The numbnuts at the shop would most likely destroy it within a year. There are a lot of little parts and if not taken care of the kit will be missing pieces and end up useless.

3.     Some real window wash. The window wash we have is horrible. It dries up before you can wipe it off and leaves streaks on the windshield. I'm not sure why they changed to this current stuff but it simply sucks.

4.     Some free stock. We need more free stock in OAK. Free stock is the stuff you take like screws, bolts, washers, etc. to replace missing hardware on the plane. Our selection in OAK is not very deep. Several times we have had to ground planes because we don't have the correct length 1/4 inch bolt and end up having to but one from United or Alaska Airlines.

5.     Some Jack Covers. Months and months go by between our using the aircraft jacks. I am talking about the wing jacks, nose, and tail jacks. There are times when we need to jack up a plane to swing the gear or re-pack a strut. We have a wet climate here. When it is not raining it is cold and foggy in the morning and at night. The jacks need covers to keep the cylinders dry. If the cylinders get too wet they pit as they corrode and that messes up the seals inside of them. A set of real cover for our jacks would likely run about $1000.00. Right now we have some busted up Home Depot buckets on top of them which are always getting blown off.

These are just some of the things that I can think of off the top of my head. It seems like every week when I am at work I find myself wondering why we don't have this or that. I don't think that a couple or maybe $100k is too much of an investment for old OAK MX.

The COAX Connector From Hell

Today at work I got to do a few "firsts" for me. I worked on a plane that had a VHF problem which was traced down to a VHF COAX connector attached to the #1 VHF antenna. I have changed the VHF antennas before and I have monkeyed around with the connectors before. My prior experience with these fun little connectors has been realizing that one was bad and MELing the system since we do not carry the right parts or equipment to fix the thing in OAK.

Since this was a #1 VHF problem it was not MELable, and since the previous shift had traced the problem and ordered the parts I had the relative easy task of putting the thing back together. A first for me, although I did do some COAX crimping at my house for TV cabling.

A little description. COAX  (Coaxial Cable) is a shielded electrical wire. The wire has an inner conductor surrounded by a flexible insulator surrounded by the tubular shielding.

The theory is that the electromagnetic field produced by radios etc. is contained within the space between the insulator and the shielding allowing COAX to be run along other wire bundles without fear of much interference. The thing about COAX on aircraft is that the length of the wire is pretty critical and you are not allowed much slack as far as simply cutting it shorter to allow crimping, stripping, etc.

The connector crimps onto the wire but you have to strip the shielded part of the wire back some so that the wire fits into the end of the connector. Looking at the picture on the right the wire feeds into the narrow hole on the left of the connector. First the barrel is placed over the wire, you push the wire into the connector, making sure it contacts the pin inside, push the shielding down over the narrow thing on the left, slide the barrel down over the whole thing and crimp it. The shielding must contact the connector to ground it out.

Not only was it my first aircraft COAX crimp but they also sent a complete Daniels Strip and Crimp set. Most of you know that Daniels makes all kinds of crimpers that we use on airplanes. They also make pin pushers and pin pullers, hex crimpers, strippers, etc. For this fix the company sent me two Daniels sets! It was pretty cool seeing just one complete set but they sent two. I tried to find out how much they cost but could only find one set on Ebay for $3000.

Any way, we used the hex crimper for COAX, we found the right die block to put into the crimper and squeezed away. When we were done we had a perfect crimp and what do you know the #1 VHF was transmitting again!

One of the things that threw me off for a little was that the wire we were working on had a wire tag on it that said #2 VHF. Apparently Boeing changed the locations of the #1 and #2 VHF antennas on the 737-700s somewhere mid production so the wire tags are all jacked up. Watch out for this one as I can see it really messing people up. I'm not sure why they did not change the tag but, whatever. That was the final first, incorrectly marked wires from the factory.

I have to wonder, this is the second COAX that I have been involved in and I know there have been others, why in such a relatively young aircraft series (the -700s) are we having so many COAX issues? Mines is not to reason why, mines is just to push tin!