Batter-OH I Mean-Mechanic Up!!

In every shop there are guys that the other guys don't think are pulling their weight. I think it is just the way it is. In any work group in any industry you will probably find the same thing.

Last week when I was at work we were pretty busy for most of the weekend. When it finally died down the guys put the show "The Franchise" on the TV. The show is about the SF Giants and the year they are having. A kind of behind the scene take on what goes on when no one is watching and what goes on to the players and their lives. It's a pretty good show, and I'm no big baseball fan.

One of the story lines was a player who got called up from the minors because of another player being injured. The guy did well but once the injured guy came back the called up player went into a slump. The Manager calls him into the office and sits him down. The Manager says "Look you know that you have been struggling, Big Bob is back and hitting good. I'm going to have to send you down (to the minors again). You have proved you can play up here (the major league), once you do some improvement you will be back."

On of the mechanics turns to me and says "Imagine we could do that to the mechanics here. They screw up over and over and they get sent down to the minors."

I thought this was a great idea! If there was a threat that you as a mechanic could be sent to a commuter airline (if there are commuter mechanics that read this blog, I apologize up front, but that is the way major airline people think). I bet that people would be a lot less irresponsible with their work!

I can picture it now: The boss comes in in the morning and calls Joe MechanCant into the office. He sits him down and says something like this:
"Joe you really screwed up that repair last night. On top of that you have two late punch ins and your paperwork keeps coming back because you are always screwing it up. I'm not sure what is going on with you MechanCant but we are going to send you down to the commuters. If you can manage to get you act together we will try to make a spot for you again".

How crazy would that be?!? Think of it from the other side. A guy got out of school, was scouted while there and picked by a commuter or 135 operation out in Colorado. After a few years there he has proven that he is worth his salt. The Airline Scouts hear about him and review his records, they even come out to talk to his boss and watch him work. After a month or so the airline scout has a meeting with his boss. Next thing you know the mechanic gets an offer to come to the big leagues!

If the mechanic is really good he may get a competing offer from another airline. Only the best of the best would be picked.

I know that it seems strange to suggest that everyone starts in a lower position like that at a 135 operation, but, think of the pay off for the airline. The mechanics who make it to an airline are the top of the bunch. There is a reason for the mechanics to strive to do their best. If the mechanic wants to screw off and be lazy he or she risks being sent down.

We all want to be the highest paid in the industry. We all know that there are guys making the same money as we do that are worth a lot less. We want to solve the industry problems we need to reevaluate how we hire and keep employees.

Let's scout the good ones out!!

The Lost Art Of The Practical Joke

When I first started at SWA there were a few characters in the shop who were great at the art of the practical joke. As the years have gone on the majority of those guys have transferred out or quit or have been fired. Those few who remain have been corralled by MGT into toning down the joking and pranks in our ever growing PC (politically correct) world. "Someones feeling may get hurt so it must be a bad thing."

To honor the old days and the guys who knew how to have fun at work I am going to share some of the pranks we used to pull. I can't recount them all because this post would be too long so I will only recount a few now and maybe it will be a recurring post.

The first is an old airline standard: The New Plane Air Sample

To pull this prank all you had to do was find a relatively new AC and some new hire Flight Attendant or Ramper. We would go up to the cabin find the newbie and give them a garbage bag. The would be told that since this was a new plane we needed air samples taken and ask them to go to the aft galley and wave the bag around to fill it up and then quickly tie the bag shut. Then they would go to the back and we would marvel at how seriously they would take their new job. This also works for Rampers and Cargo Bin air samples.

The Mechanic or Supervisor in training prank.

There was a guy who I will call Picard. Picard was one of those guys who was good at thinking up pranks and very good at execution of the prank. Picard would find out who was going to DAL for training and then figure out what hotel and room they were staying in. We all worked graveyard at the time so at around 3am DAL time he would call the room and tell the guy he had to move his rental car because he parked in the wrong area or whatever.
When the guy came back we would ask him about it, and they would all admit that they got up and moved the car or that they were in the elevator before they realized that Picard had got them.

Mice and Rats

We had a mechanic who I will call Prince. Prince was easily scared. When he was frightened he would scream like a girl!! You could sneak up behind him when he was changing a tire and yell BOO and he would jump three feet.
The guys found a dead mouse one day and tied a string around it's neck then taped the string to the inside of an Altoids tin. When you opened the tin the mouse's head would pop up out. This tin was left on the table in the break room and of course people would open the tin and get a surprise. When Prince opened the tin and the mouse popped up he screamed and jumped and the tin went flying across the room.
One of our best capers was when we cornered a killed a huge rat. This thing was the size of a small cat and had huge sharp teeth. We knew Prince was working day shift the next morning so we came up with a scheme. We tied the dead rat to an inboard landing light box with safety wire and tape, leaving about a foot of slack between the box and the rat. Then we positioned the box on the shelf so that it was closest and so the natural choice of anyone who would grab a light. When Prince came in we got in a place where we could see the show. Prince being a smoker was out in front of the shop near the landing light rack. We put out a fake call for a landing light change. Prince said he would get it and grabbed the box. To his surprise a huge rat came jumping off the rack from behind the landing light box! Prince went screaming and jumping out the parts room door. The best part was that he held onto the landing light box and so the rat was swinging after him all the way out the shop!

We had probbies trying to recylce old landing light bulbs (another Picard stunt).
We used to put Dave's Insanity Sauce (a really hot hot sauce) on cookies and popcorn and even in coffee.
Picard was a master at putting tiny holes into the coffee cups and watching people spill all over themselves.
Back in the day before computer orders for uniforms we would change peoples uniform pant size to something like 28 waist 42 length.
We used to tell the probbies that Wed was free coffee day in the terminal for SWA employees, they would go up stairs and show their badge and the coffee shop lady would look at them like fools. We had to stop that when one probbie took orders from everyone and ended up putting over $60 of coffee on his credit card.

All this does is remind me how much has changed at SWA MX in Oakland. These things would never fly these days. Too much babying of grown men. I couldn't imagine scaring someone with a dead rat these days. I would get time off with no pay because I hurt their pride or something. Stay tuned for more pranks from back in the day.

Maintenance -A Language Of It's Own

My wife is a pilot. A lot of my wife's friends are pilots. When her pilot friends come over or we are spending time with them they always start talking pilot talk and I have no idea what they are saying! I started to wonder about aircraft maintenance and  mechanics. Do we have our own language? When outsiders are amongst us aircraft mechanics do they have trouble understanding what we are talking about?

Of course the answer to both of these questions is: YES! We at SWA have our own lingo we revert to when we are in the break room or trouble shooting, etc. We have the tried and true 3 letter (or more) acronyms such as APU, CDS, EGT, FMC, and on and on and on.

There are other things that we say which are airline maint. specific. I started to compile a list of these sayings. Although I am not close to being finished with my list I figured I would share some with you guys and see if you readers have anything to add. With just one weekends work we at the shop came up with the following:

Aisle Donkey          a flight attendant

Dip-Shittery            your basic cluster in progress

Angle of the Dangle          this refers to using wrenches or tools and how the angle of the fastener relates   to the angle of the wrench you are using to remove it.

German Torque          unspecified torque on a bolt or fastener.

Pretzelized          when something is totally out of shape or crushed up

PBA          Prolly-Be-Alright

Lick it, Stick it and Kick it!!     MEL the thing and get it out of here.

Pushin' Tin          The process of keeping planes in the air. Doing maintenance so the plane keeps flying.

These are just a few of the things we say at work and I will keep adding to the list as time goes on. Until then keep Pushin' Tin!!

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.