Another Week Another Learning Experience

A plane was grounded when I got to work a couple of weeks ago. Not that unusual. What was unusual was the issue with the plane. this plane needed a stab trim cable replaced. We, in Oakland, have no experience with this type of job and in fact it is really considered a hangar job.

Another mechanic, Dr. was also starting his work week and we decided to work the plane since he, like me, enjoys doing jobs that we have never done before. There was a crew coming in from Phoenix to change out the cable but they were not going to arrive until around 11pm.

After checking the paperwork Dr. and I decided that there was plenty we could do while waiting for the Phoenix guys. Since I have a vast experience doing Cabin work (thanks Delta) I went inside and started to take apart the interior. What we had to do was to expose the Idler Pulleys in the system so that the new cable could be routed.

I took out the seats in the over wing area and pulled up the carpet and removed the floor panel and what do ya know...there were the pulleys.

Dr. in the mean time pulled the ceiling out of the bag bins to access more idler pulleys.

The Phoenix guys arrived and brought all those cool special tools that those hangar guys have. The best thing was that "the" cable guy came out with them. This guy, I'll call him The Cable Whisperer, pretty much only does cable and rigging jobs back in Phoenix.

Long story short we learned that changing those cables is not as scary as it first sounds. We learned a lot of tricks. We learned that a guy who has been working at this company for over 30 years can work circles around us!

One of the best parts of the job was when almost the entire roster of Day shift came out the next morning to help us out. Dr. and I had to leave but those guys closed up the plane and she is on her way making us money as we speak.

I Just Do Not Understand

Blade damage-Big Time!!!- Thanks AzWoman

I claimed I was not going to complain anymore about how people work, but I can not let this go. I really love being an aircraft mechanic and I come from a pretty strong background of folks who work hard. I know that I am not always motivated and have off days-everyone does.

Why would a guy complain about me not doing his work and then complain about having to do his work? I know that's not real clear so let me give an example. This just happened to me:

I'm working swing shift on a Saturday. Saturdays in OAK are not the busiest days. The terminating planes usually come in early on Saturday as well. There were four of us working, me and three midnight shift mechanics. Now this whole thing between midnights and swings has been going on for a couple of years now. The midnight guys want the swings guys to "bust out" or work on planes that come in early, reducing the amount of work they have to deal with at night. Sounds good. The problem is that even when two or three planes are knocked out there are a number of midnight shift mechanics who will still complain about what they are assigned to work. Then there are the guys who say "wow you guys could only finish up three planes?" or "yeah swings did three plane, but they were only MV-1s."

These kinds of comments do not sit well with people who are on swing shift. They get no benefit from working the RON planes and then they get complaints about doing it. So the thing is-why help RON knock out planes when the RON guys just say that it is not enough?

We have all worked midnights and we all know how it is to stay up all night and get broke planes when you thought you had a relatively easy night. ALL the guys on days and swings worked graveyards, and  a lot of us worked graveyards at other airlines that had no "down time" when you finished a job, only more work brought into a hangar etc. We know what it is like. To say things like "you could only knock out one plane?" to us is very condescending.

Back to my story:

I was Lead and I like to run the shift with out having to keep a "list". A list is simply that, we list the mechanics working on a piece of paper and go down the list in turn when a gate call comes up. Most grown up people do not need a list to govern their actions but apparently a lot of mechanics do. Usually when no list is used we simply take turns and believe me you know who went before you and when you need to volunteer to get up and do something. Again this only works with grown ups!! As I was the lead I went to the first terminating plane. While there a gatecall came in for hydraulics at gate 25. I got on the radio and asked if someone could get it and after a pause one of the guys said sure.  About this time the terminaters started to come in hot and heavy and of course the three guys went out to work on them so they could have a few less planes at night, I understand that. What I do not understand is that when SWING shift gatecalls came in and I asked someone-anyone to get the call I got no answer on the radio. It went like this:

Ops: "Maint. Gate 28 wants oil"
Me: "Copy that, can any one get that?"
Others: ".........................." (silence)

So I had to call out names just to get the gatecalls done. Then I come to find out (the next day) that one of these guys was overheard saying that there were four guys on swings, but only three guys working. He thinks that I did nothing all shift!

I can't believe this but I should not be surprised. I did not work on any terminating aircraft. My job, my responsibility is for through flight planes. We were working SWING shift, not coming in early as sometimes happens to knock out RON planes. Plus the three of them were ALLOWED by ME to work on those planes. I could have stopped them but I didn't. Why would this guy say this about me? Why let me do you a favor and then turn around and spit in my face? Why complain about the work you are assigned? Why get so mad as to kick tool boxes, throw tools, yell at the work board? The simple reality is that some of us are not mature enough to have reasonable responses when things do not go our perceived way.

It's amazing how the same 8-10 guys are the ones who have problems with their work assignments and these same guys are the ones who concentrate more on what other shifts are doing than how they themselves are behaving on their own shift. It's called projection folks! You know you suck so you try to PROJECT that same attribute onto others.

I learned my lesson, I will ALWAYS take the Lead when it is available to me and I will ALWAYS keep a list when those guys are on shift. And I will ALWAYS make it clear that the gatecalls will take top priority. I guess the days of working with grownups are over. Oh and I will be having a "come to Jesus" talk with this one loud mouth.

To Cargo Door Or To Not Cargo Door

This past weekend an old -300 came in and I had the pleasure of Terminating the plane. While doing the walk around I noticed that the rampers were having trouble opening the aft cargo door. This is not unusual and in fact happens a lot. Usually there is a bag or box that has fallen on the door or the door was closed with the cable or cable handle struck in the door jamb. This was what I suspected was the trouble but once the ramp supervisor and I got the door open it was clear that the threshold plate was damaged.

The plate was cracked and peeled up in such a way that it formed a pointy triangle that stuck up about and inch to an inch and a half. The rampers still had to get the bags off and I had to move the plane from the gate to Tango remote area. I got a hammer and beat the section back down so I could close the door for the remote and the rampers could off load the bags. The threshold is stainless steel and once I got it bent back, the piece broke off. I was able to remote the plane and wrote up the threshold plate on the board in the shop so that the mechanic who worked the plane that night could inspect it.

The next morning I found out that the threshold needed to be replaced (big surprise) AND the cargo door needed to be replaced as well. I admit that I did not look at the door when i was terminating as I should have done once I saw the condition of the threshold. I was surprised even more when I was told that the cargo door was being flown in on a ferry flight for US to change out! I know that we are mechanics and the this is a job that we SHOULD be able to accomplish in OAK. The reason I was surprised about it is that we have very little tooling in OAK and even less hardware etc.

Old Threshold with piece missing that I broke off.

Those of us who have worked hangar work or non-sched type maint. know that work like this is not as straight forward as it sounds. There is always something that will go wrong or some part that will be needed which is not originally thought of. In other words the can of worms will be opened!!

The plane should have been ferried out to PHX as was originally planned but as we know MX control knows better than us when it comes to such things. Instead of ferrying the plane to PHX the door was ferried to us and of course the plane sat here for three days because:

We have no parts.
We have no tooling.
The new threshold plate came without any holes and was then mis-drilled.
PHX mechanics had to come and RESCUE us.
The new door had to be fitted into the old opening.

On day two I went out to the plane to get some grip lengths for our manager, this was before the PHX rescue mission, I decided to check and see how far off the new mis-drilled threshold was. when I put it on I saw that only two of the holes were off, and those holes were not off by much. One hole was almost off by half a hole the other by about a quarter of a hole. I hate to say this but I think that I could have made it work. The persons assigned to the job were not real happy about doing it and so I think they found a convenient stopping point once they saw that the holes were a little off.

This is a recurring theme at OAK. We have people who are not interested in going the extra mile of trying to solve problems in order to get planes fixed. As I keep saying we in OAK cried, and cried about doing OPC mods (moving the On Board Computers in the -300 AC) until they stopped assigning them to us and MX Control thinks we will be able to hang a new cargo door? Any non-sched mechanic would have drilled out those holes and put larger fasteners or washers or something on it to make it work. Like I said this was an old plane and it has no winglets, and only one FMC so I believe SWA is going to be getting rid of it soon. A couple of button head fasteners instead of flush ones would not hurt this plane in any way shape or form.

The PHX guys came in and actually did the real maintenance work that the OAK guys didn't want to do. When they were half way through they came back to the shop and what really amazed them was that no one came out to watch them and maybe learn how to do the job for the next time. That says a lot about the level of work ethic in OAK and about what we once had that seems to be missing now-pride of workmanship.

Guys are more interested in resting than working and god forbid you ask them to try and learn something new. This is one of the things that is chasing me out of this station. Sure it's expensive to live here and I have personal reasons for leaving but this laziness is one of the things that makes it all little easier to make the move. I'm not sure if any of that exists in DAL but I am sure that it has been lost in OAK and that's a real sad thing for me to think about. I have learned a lot from a lot of people while working in OAK but now there are way more people who need to learn way more but don't want to. They have us out numbered.