You Have Heard Of Morning People? What About A Morning Plane?

These past few days have been busy here in Oakland Line MX. The crew is now staffed to four guys on the weekend and Saturday happened to be one of those days when we only had four guys. Sounds like four should be good but we also had 10 aircraft parked at the remote parking all of which had to be moved within about a two hour period. Our remote parking area "Tango" has provisions for "stacking" the planes, in other words spot Tango 10 has a fwd and an aft position. For Tango 10 aft to remote it must wait for Tango 10 fwd to move first. Once you figure in late rampers, late operations people, late mechanics, you can see how four guys can get overwhelmed by the number of moves that have to go on.

This was the case on Saturday morning when two guys were trapped on planes waiting to remote by a ground stop in Burbank due to fog. The ground stop prevented the plane on the gate from pushing which kept a plane on Tango, which in turn trapped another plane in the aft position at Tango. It was very busy and crazy but not what I was going to write about.

There was a plane, an originator, that called with a question. I had actually moved the plane from Tango 7 about 40 minutes earlier. When I first boarded the plane when it was at Tango the APU would not start. After two tries it finally lit off and I moved her. When the crew called I was stuck on Tango so another guy went to the call.

Apparently what was happening was the FO's instruments were losing power. This sounds like a problem that can be troubleshot but not this time. The problem was that this would happen occasionally when the ground power was powering the plane, then it would fix itself and the problem would shift to the APU power. I'm not sure I said that correctly so: The FO's instruments would go down when the plane was powered by the ground power. it would work fine while the APU generator was powering the bus. Then it would go away and come back but this time the problem would be while the APU was powering the bus.

After deplaning and grounding the plane everything worked fine. We all went back to the shop and sat around the table trying to decide the correct course of action. After some discussion we figured that we should run the engines to see if the problem would show up while the plane was on the engine generators. If all worked well we would MEL the APU generator, which is what we ended up doing.

I came to work for midnight shift and of course the plane was spending the night in Oakland! One of the guys changed some relays and could not get it to break.

The next morning: "Maintenance, electrical question at gate 23". Guess which plane it was?? Once again after some switching and prodding the problem went away.

I figure, and I have experienced, this morning plane syndrome. There are some planes that take a long time to wake up for that first flight, but then seem to work fine the rest of the day. These temper mental planes need an extra start attempt, another power switch, a good swift hit with the trusty MagLite to get them going. Ever wonder why people refer to planes as she or her. I submit that this is the reason.