Things You See At The Airport

I recently wrote about an American Airlines MD-80 that had it's nose gear pulled out by a huge jet tug. That got me thinking about all the cool things and all the strange things you get to see at an airport. I'm going to try and recount some of these things in this post, they are in no particular order and some of the pictures are from the Internet.

One of the nicest rituals practiced at an airport are the fire engine salutes to pilots who are retiring. When the pilot taxis in for the final time the fire engines line the taxi way and shoot arcs of water over the taxi way which the pilot taxis through. I know for those of you who have not witnessed this it seems kind of strange but it really is cool.

This same thing was done recently in OAK for Alaska Airlines. The airline was phasing out the MD-80 and the last MD-80 flight out of OAK was saluted in the same way.

Although the next picture is not as dramatic it shows the sense of unity that work groups at SWA have. There was a Provisioning guy who either retired or was hurt and way from work, or just buried a loved one, or had just returned from Iraq,I can't remember which. Anyway to show their co-worker that they were thinking of him the provo guys lined up their trucks and raised them as a salute.

Of course you get to see all kinds of cool airplanes while working at the airport. One of the first strange planes that I saw come into OAK was one of those huge Russian cargo planes. This one was not the six engined monster but rather it's little brother with four engines. We went over to check it out and it was a tank. The thing I remember most about that plane was the tires. All the tires were bald and most of them had patches on them. This stuck in my head because we at SWA change tires when they first show patch so for me to see these bad tires was crazy.

We also get to see a lot of fighter jets doing fly bys and buzzing the field. One time during Fleet Week in the Bay Area a mechanic and I drove over to the old United/World hangar to check out the Blue Angels who were using the area to set up for the show. We drove our little pick-up over there and stayed a respectable distance from them as they set up. One of their mechanics strolled up to us and we figured he was going to tell us to leave. Instead he says that he noticed our truck had a tow hitch and would we mind towing a ground power unit over to one of the planes for him? HELL YEAH we will. That was pretty cool in a maintenance geek type of way.

On another day I was out in the remote parking area trying to start one of the piece of junk man lifts that we had back then. I had my back to the airport and was facing the bay. This tremendous roar swept over me and about 100 feet passing directly over me was a B-17. I think he got permission to do a low pass over the field, saw me up on this man lift with my back to him and decided to have some fun.

At night I have seem falling stars, satellites, and even the space shuttle as it passed over head. I have seem all kinds of birds and I've seem all kinds of birds that have been hit by the airplanes. We got called for a bird strike once and found a whole bird wrapped around the number two brake.

One of the coolest things I saw was when Delta Airlines brought home the body of a soldier killed in Iraq. The whole airport was silent. Normally there is constant radio chatter but they requested that no one make any calls as the plane taxied to the gate. The family was escorted to the plane by some military vehicles and watched their kid get unloaded and put into a Hearst. The family drove away and there must have been over a hundred guys on Harleys waiting at the gate who escorted the family home with American flags flying on their bikes, very emotional.

I'll try to remember some more but a lot of these things happened before I got into the habit of taking pictures at work. These things are all the stuff that make working at an airport fun. Away from all the union things, job security issues, TSA garbage, its things like this that a guy in an office building some where down town will never get to experience.

Oil, oil and more OIL!!!

Those of you who work Line Maintenance know that a good portion of the calls we get during the course of the day are for things like coffee makers, seat belts, window washes, and of course oil. This past week started off normal enough. I start work mid week and one of the first calls was for oil. This is not unusual but as the day progressed it seemed like all the flight crews wanted oil. There were 5 or 6 of us on shift that day and I would bet that each of us went through 2 or 3 cases of oil EACH!!

We have a table that we put our empty oil cans on to drain out the last bits of oil and make the cans clean for the recyclers. The table was full and the cans were stacked! I know that this happens every now and then but this seemed to be excessive. Easily every other call was for oil I was amazed.

Turns out that the flight crews have a new requirement that says they must call Maintenance Control if they are at a station with no SWA maintenance and their oil qty is 65% or lower. I can only guess as to the reasoning behind this but I'm sure that if the dollars and cents, nitty gritty, nuts and bolts were explained to me, then it would make total sense. What I do know is that the flight crews do not want to talk to Maintenance Control. They like talking to them so little that they make sure that they get the oil filled up at a Maintenance Station, like OAK.

I admit that it is tiresome to go out and put 2 or 3 quarts of oil into an engine. I start to think things like "It's raining out here, the Captain is nice and dry upstairs and called me out in this mess to put a lousy 2 quarts of oil in the engine?!" Of course there are times when I have put over 10 quarts into an engine and that pisses me off too. "How could these fools leave whatever station they were at with the oil being so low?" It really irks me that  they would treat the engines, my engines like that.

I think whats going on is that the company wants to save as much money as possible and it really is kind of silly to have to pay contract maintenance to put oil in a plane that just left OAK (or where ever) one or two legs ago. Saving money helps SWA put food on my table so I guess I will go oil up that plane in the rain, snow, heat, dark even if it's a mere two quarts. It's taking care of our engines and our bottom line, two birds-one can of oil, type of thing.

An Incident From Back In The Day

When you work at an airport you get to see a lot of interesting things. I have witnessed near miracles and near tragedies. This following story falls some place in the middle.

I was working day shift with the usual band of odd balls. In OAK there are 32 gates. SWA has 12 of them. On any given night there are 22 aircraft that spend the night, as a result we have to move up to 10 planes each night to our remote parking area. When this incident happened there were were fewer gates, a total of 27 of which we at SWA used 11.

We were not the only game in town and there are other airlines that also push their planes off the gates at night. One of those airlines was American Airlines (AA no longer flies into Oakland). After all the SWA planes had been brought to the gates we noticed a commotion over by the MD-80 which AA has parked out on the ramp over night parking.

I rolled out there with my buddy SkyWalker and the nose gear on the MD-80 was pulled out of the strut.

  

The picture above is how she looked when we got there. When I worked at Delta we used to move MD-80s around with bag tugs, but that was not going to do it for this bunch of idiots! The contract ramp company had hooked up a wide-body tug that looked like it could have pulled the airport terminal building itself across the ramp up to this poor little MD-80.

The communication between the cockpit and the tug driver was not what I would call ideal. It seems that the aircraft brakes were set when the tug driver decided to FLOOR IT!!!

As a result the plane did not budge but that was not going to stop this gigantic tug. The tug proceeded to pull the nose tires/lower strut completely off the plane!

Well as you would expect all the AA big brass managers were all standing around scratching their heads. There was a lady who I assume to be the top OAK manager who asked my pal SkyWalker to stop taking pictures of the plane so naturally in fine SWA fashion he started taking pictures of her instead.

The AA Go-Team or Top notch Mechs showed up a few hours later with airbags and lifted her up.

That part was pretty interesting. The huge bags were inflated and they put in a new strut and the plane was gone the next day.

When she was up off the ground they put some chocks under her from the contract company that did the damage in the first place.

These types of things are happening all the time at airports. I have probably forgotten way more things like this than I can remember but I'll get with SkyWalker and see if he remembers any more.

Black Clouds

As a person who goes to work a lot I will be the first to admit that the majority of the days/shifts I spend at work are pretty unremarkable. Things break and we get them fixed. So why is it that the only days that you remember are the days that the "black cloud" comes out and hovers over you. For example: One night when I was working midnight shift I was assigned two or three planes (I don't remember) and it was raining. My assigned planes were pretty clean on the white board. The white board is where all our planes for the night are written down and any work that is to be done on the  plane is written next to the AC number. The problem with the white board is that once the plane is terminated those nice "clean" planes become a nightmare of pilot write ups and items found during your walk around.

As usual when its raining two of my planes were arriving at almost the same time and both remoting out to Tango. The first one comes in and when I got up stairs the pilot was writing in the log book (not a good sign). He tells me that the FO's windshield wiper is inop, "has been the whole day." One of the long standing jokes in maintenance is that those windshield wipers only seem to break when its raining outside!!  I parked that plane and went back for my second one which had a forward position light out on it. Usually not a problem but like I said it was raining.  I knew from experience that changing a fwd position light in the rain means that, no matter how much rain gear you have on, you are going to get wet.

The following week the black cloud seemed to stay with me. Most of the gate calls I went on turned into huge events with delays and cancelled flights. I grounded a plane on Monday with a Weather Radar problem that I had never seem before. To my amazement I grounded another plane on the following Thursday with the same issue. PSEU lights, Up Lock sensors, Stab Out of Trim lights they all seemed to follow me all week long.

  The last thing was the aft lav issue. I had a gate call that was reported to be a lav switch intermittent. When I get up there I figure out pretty fast that the toilet itself has to be replaced. Of course it has been messed up for like three or four legs now so its full of stuff.  To make sure the problem was not the switch I had to take the cover off which flew out of my hand and directly into the toilet. To make matters worse when it hit the stuff in the toilet the stuff splashed up and went all over the front of my speed suit. Like a trooper I soldiered on and had to take half the wall apart, the cover for the shut off valve apart, the frozen in place mount bolts out.

About this time the FO decided to come to the back of the plane to argue with me about holding passenger boarding. Of course the new toilet had to fight me going back in.

I am headed back to work tomorrow and I hope that the black cloud is gone by then. The work is the same work that I do everyday but on those days when the black cloud is following you the everyday jobs turn into a grind.

Spending Money

Last weekend I had an opportunity to assist three guys who were changing a C-Duct (a thrust reverser half) on one of our planes.This plane had been down for two days now costing the company big money. TR halves are very expensive (about half a million bucks I've been told) so we were spending some money that day. These guys had the old TR half off by the time I got out there. I was just going to snap a few pics and be on my way but since I had never changed one before I wanted to check out what they were doing.

Rare sight. No fan cowl and no core cowl!

It turns out that I was able to help out a little with the installation of the new TR half.  It was really windy that day so it was good that I hung around. When Brooklyn picked up the TR half  the with the fork lift the wind caught it immediately and it took two of us to steady the thing while it was positioned.

The different slings and hoists that are engineered to accomplish jobs like this always amaze me. The set up they sent for this was a chain hung from the forks on the fork lift going to a block and then to a pole that connects into a big C shaped frame that connects onto the C Duct.

Muscling the new C Duct in

Those guys got the old C Duct off and the new one on in about two hours! That's a pretty good time. I learned a little along the way and except for the wind it was a very smooth job.

Questions Of The Month

Imagine paying a group of people to troubleshoot, diagnose, and fix a problem but then requiring them to call you EVERY time they change a part to get your blessing on putting the correct part in. Why would you not just pay some non-skilled person to describe the problem to you and change the part you want them too? What does this do to the employee? How can it be fixed?

A Series Of Unfortunate Events

These past few weeks at Southwest Airlines have been very busy. The incident we had with a lap joint on top of the fuselage of one of our 737-300s has been well documented by the media. Planes have been inspected, inspection methods have been changed and we all have been educated by this unfortunate event. Of course if any of you mechanics out there are like me I had to answer to an even higher authority than the FAA-my father.

As soon as I heard about the airplane I knew that I would be getting a call from my father very soon. My father also went to Aviation High School in NY. Although he never got to use his licence he did spend his working career in maintenance working for the NYC Transit Authority, rising through the ranks eventually to become the first black supervisor of the Structures Division in the Transit Authority. As you can imagine he had some questions for me regarding exactly what was going on at SWA Maintenance. He did call and we discussed the whole aging aircraft thing and that was that.

Being a mechanically minded fellow he handily understood most of my airline jargon while I jabbered away about lap joints, aircraft cycles, etc. This has been going on for my whole career, any incident that Delta Airlines had while I worked there was discussed. Any kind of cargo carrier that had mechanical issues while I worked at Ameriflight was cause for a call and discussion. As a matter of fact any plane incident can spur on these types of calls. While these unfortunate events are not something that any mechanic hopes to see they are a reality of our industry. My fathers calls help me to keep in the forefront of my mind that my family flies on these planes that I work on. I like most mechanics know that if we do not stay sharp and perform to the utmost of our abilities that bad things can happen. When I first started at SWA and was a little unsure of my self I asked one of the "vets" if he thought I should change a tire or not. This guy was a wise, older gentleman and he said that any time he is not sure about working on something or not he just thinks "would I feel ok if my wife and kids got on this plane in the morning and I had not changed that part." That was all it took for me.

These calls from my relatives (mostly my dad) remind me that the job I do is a very important one. The job we do is not easy, the job requires us to say no a lot and disappoint and inconvenience travellers now and then. Sometimes we are heroes but a lot of times we come off as the bad guys. That is simply the nature of the business. I love my job and I love working at Southwest Airlines there are people I work with that can not honestly say those things. Those people can make it harder for the others but no matter where you go you will find those types of people. I hope to never see something like this last incident happen to ANY AIRLINE but it is especially rotten for it to happen to MY airline. Southwest Airlines have the best maintained airplanes in the industry and we will remedy this issue.