Road Trips

Often times when you work as a Line Mechanic you are asked to go on the road to fix a plane. We say "road trip" although most of the time we fly to an out station that a plane is broken at. We in Oakland travel to San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento, Reno, San Diego, Burbank, Orange County, Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Boisie and I'm sure there are some I'm forgetting.

Working on the road is everything being a Line Mechanic is about. Freedom, independence, pressure, pride of work, it all comes into play. The only difference is that the company is relying even more on you to get the job done and you have even fewer resources with which to do it. Often you only have what you brought. Parts, tools and equipment have to be thought out ahead of time based on the job at hand (this is where a good stores clerk comes in handy). We pack boxes with our tools and parts that we think will most likely fix the plane.

The obvious problem with this system is that there are times when the things we bring do not fix the plane. When this happens we have to communicate with the AOG desk and they can get us the parts or equipment we need most often by flying us more stuff.

I like going on road trips. I like the challenge. They are especially fun when you get to go with a mechanic that shares your working style. I have gone on probably a hundred road trips since I have been at SWA and a couple stand out for completely different reasons.

One day I flew down to San Diego for a hydraulic leak on the left wing. I went down there with one of the guys senior to me. We packed the usual stuff for a hydraulic leak, rags, the temp line kit, a good selection of wrenches, and lots of rags. We also packed one drill motor and a few (like 5 drill bits). So we get down to San Diego and go to the plane, turn it on, I clear him for hydraulics and a leak the size of Niagra Falls erupts from the left outboard flap area. In order to investigate further we drive the flaps down electrically and one of the larger hydraulic lines up in there is sawed almost in half by the aileron cable. One of the pulleys that the cable rides on broke allowing the cable to rest on the tube eventually cutting it. Well this line was like eight feet long. The line actually went from that area into the left pylon. Needless to say we had no pulleys and no line. The company got a pulley on the way to us and we got to work putting three or four temp lines together to create a line long enough for what we needed.

To get to the union inside the pylon we had to take off three panels on the pylon. As a lot of you know those screws don't just come out, most of them are painted over or stripped out. Remember we had one drill and 5 drill bits and ended with something like twenty screws to drill out! On top of that we had two easy outs that the other guy happened to find in the bottom of his tool bag. Around 3am we were down to our last drill bit and the drill was dying but we managed to drill out all the screws. We took turns resting while we fit the temp line and clamped it into place. At around 8am out pulley came in and once again we lucked out by having pulley blocks in our stuff. We finished around 1 or 2 pm and flew back completely filthy.

The other road trip that was memorable was a "simple" strut service in Sacramento. Me and my buddy drove up there expecting to pump up the strut and be all good. Once we got there we realized we had a bigger problem. All the fluid came out of the strut. Luckily there was some strut oil in the supply shed in Sacramento but we had no pump to put it into the strut. So we pumped the strut way high with nitrogen, cleaned to strut and lubriplated it (it was still legal to do that way back then) in hopes that we could clean and condition the seals enough that they would seal up again. We lowered the strut all the way down, and repeated this two or three times. The last time we lowered it and went to work trying to figure out how to get the fluid into the strut. So my buddy "finds" some hose that we can use and we jury rig a pump made out of an empty hand cleaner pump bottle. This thing only held like two or three ounces of fluid at at time but that s all we had. We took the service nipple off the strut, fed the hose in and began pumping. This process took quite a while but it worked. We put it all back together and pumped it full of nitrogen and it held.

Road trips can be challenging because of what you are going to fix and they can be challenging due to lack of parts and supplies. In either case it helps if you and the person you are with are on the same page when it comes to getting the job done. Remember the beauty is in the struggle!!