The View from The Ground

When you were a kid and you flew on an airplane I can guarantee that you begged your parents for the window seat and sat in awe of the people who worked outside getting the plane ready for your flight. I know I did and I affected me so much that I started my career in aviaiton at a very young age.

Although that kid is still inside me somewhere the view from the ground, working on these beasts has somewhat tarnished. I'm not sure if it is the fact that the work is hard, the work is often thankless, or the work sometimes has to be done under extreme pressure or circumsatnce. I love airplanes and I love working on them and I don't think that will ever end. What has ended is my desire to go the extra mile while I'm at work. I still do more than most I think but there was a time that I did way more than was required of me.

This may be a normal "growing" process that I am going through but the "edge" or the "eye of the tiger" has left me. I am an "old school" guy and the way things have changed in our industry has left me behind. I recently took an on line test to renew my Taxi and Run up privledges within SWA. Fourteen years ago when I began my career at SWA I took a similar test. The test was not on line of course but instead relied on one of the Senior mechanics to instruct me on how to safely operate an engine and perform taxi manuvers with proficiency. This process probably took 3 weeks in total. I had never taxiied an airplane or even had run up rivledges at Delta Airline so I soaked all the new info up like a sponge. The mechanic teaching us was methodical an often predictable with the emergency scenarios he threw at us but it was a very effective way to teach.

The first time I taxiied there were a couple of flight attendants on board watching us. As you know when you first throttle up and the plane just begins to move, you do a break check to ensure they are working correctly. Being the first time I was doing this I really slammed on the breaks, the plane STOPPED and our guests went sprawling forward and into the flight deck. The first time I taxied to the gate I was off the J-Line by about two feet so I had to buy Doughnuts for the guys.

Long and short of it: I learned by doing. Fast forward 14 years. I'm sitting in front of a computer which gives me a lesson and the a test. Much to my dismay there are 11 parts to the Taxi and Engine Start each one taking about 45 mins to go through, test, and review if necessary. At the end of the thing is the Final Exam. So that's a total of 12 tests and about two shifts of course work to go through. I have to say I feel like this is a result of the company not taking care of those mechanics who mess up, while taxiing, there by requiring all of us to sit through this torture. I learned less in those 11 lessons than I did 14 years earlier and I killed a bunch of brain cells by staring at a computer monitor for 8 hours over the course of two days. Add to this that I still had to go out and do gate calls when it was my turn and you can see that for a guy like me this is no way to learn something. I passed, and I passed with a very good grade, but I hardly learned any thing new.

That is the direction that this job is going for me. More and more rules and procedures with less and less reward. It's like the growing trend for a second mechanic to check your work when you are done. I do not like this and I'm sure there is more stuff like that to come. I will still work my best and do my job as well as I can but the atmosphere at work has changed and I do not seem to be able to change with it.