CAREER DEVELOPMENT
The Pros I will start with the positive aspects of these jobs, starting with the fi eld base mechanic. Job satisfaction was my biggest reward to fi eld work. I knew that my brother mechanic (who was working in the hangar) didn’t get the recognition that he or she deserved every day. When I went to work in the morning at the hospital, I got the satisfaction of working with a team of medical professionals and being an integral part of that team. That team was made up of a pilot, a fl ight nurse and a paramedic.
I got the opportunity to be there when that rescue fl ight came in and the patient was brought into the emergency room and his life was saved. I’ve seen my aircraft on the evening news and heard the community praise our program. You can’t help being touched by this and feeling proud. I wished that I could have passed this praise on to the people in the hangar, whether they are the mechanics, logistics, records, avionics, paint shop, engine shop staff or anyone else who I called for support. I couldn’t do that job alone, but I was the one standing there when the patient’s family came over to thank me for keeping the helicopter fl ying. I’m the one who got to look like a hero. I was the one who got the recognition around the hospital and the community. I enjoyed it when people knew my name. My normal introduction went something like this: “This is Terry Peed, he’s the helicopter mechanic for Nightingale,” and it usually went into a public relations spiel and sometimes I got a true-life account of someone who had a loved one saved by our program. You can’t listen to those stories and not have them aff ect you. There are numerous other advantages to fi eld base work. As our duty hours were 24/7 and I was the lone mechanic on call full-time, it would be easy for me to portray my pager (see, I’m dating myself) as a ball and chain — and believe me, I will in another section of this article — but for now I am writing about the pros of fi eld base work. My freedom wouldn’t have been possible without the aid of my friend the pager. Now we have cell phones that make it even easier to have full-time communications with the fl ight crew. You don’t need to be at the hospital all of the time. For me, the pager allowed me to come in to the hospital in the morning, do my daily inspection, service the aircraft, do any maintenance or inspections that were required, then run my errands to the post offi ce, UPS, hardware store or whatever I needed to do, whether it was for the program or for me. It gave me the fl exibility to do what needed to be done. I know that it was hard for the people in the hangar (those who were required to be at work eight hours a day) to understand that I was not always at the hospital when they called. Their fi rst reaction was to say, “It must be nice to be able to run around town all day and get paid for it.” The fact was that I didn’t have anyone else to run these errands for me. There were hundreds of little tasks that I was responsible for and that needed to be done. Many of these tasks just weren’t documented. You get to be your own boss, to an extent, and you have the control over your maintenance program. With this goes a lot of responsibility. You must discipline yourself. It’s easy to get lax.
The fact that I was required to be on call didn’t mean that I had to quit living. On the contrary, I had to keep active both mentally and physically. In the beginning, I used to sit at home and wait to be called in to fi x a broken helicopter and it just about drove me crazy. I was afraid to go anywhere for fear of getting called in the middle of dinner or a date. If I was called in, I was required to be on site in one hour. After a while of this stress, my boss (the lead program pilot) convinced me to get involved in something constructive. He suggested I go back to school and get a degree. I never would have been able to do this if I were working full time in the hangar. I learned to take better care of my aircraft so that fewer surprises popped up and I would have time to take the required classes to get my degree. When maintenance was done, the aircraft would be available for fl ying. There was little I had to do at those times so I could concentrate on my studies. I had full support and encouragement of my team and I owe all my success to them. This is how I used my time in the fi eld when my aircraft was in service and wasn’t requiring maintenance. There are many other activities that fi eld base mechanics do to keep busy. Many participate in sports, church, hobbies, community aff airs, charities and even side businesses. I was single at the time, but fi eld base maintenance gives guys with families the opportunity to spend time at home with them. The main secret is to not let these activities interfere with your primary job, the airworthiness of your aircraft and the safety of your crew.
The Cons There are cons to every job. That’s why they call it work. Not everything is rosy when you’re a fi eld base mechanic. The fi rst thing that comes to mind for me is that you are on call 24/7. You are required to be available any time, any day if the program is having any trouble. I once got called in to my program at about 8:00 p.m. when it started to get dark because the pilot couldn’t get the instrument lights to come on. I got dressed and drove about 20 minutes down to the hospital and met with the crew that immediately asked me how long this was going to take to fi x and should they take the aircraft out of service. I told them that I hadn’t had time to even get to the aircraft yet to troubleshoot. I walked out to the aircraft with the pilot while he briefed me on his situation. I hooked up power to the aircraft and climbed in the cockpit to turn the lights on. I turned on power and nothing. I looked up at the overhead circuit breaker panel and pushed in the popped out “instrument light” circuit breaker and the lights came on. The look on his face was priceless. He swore that he looked up there and it wasn’t popped. He admitted that he might have looked at the wrong breaker but he wasn’t sure. That was an easy fi x. Everything turned out fi ne and they didn’t need to go out of service. I did my job. I was there to reassure the crew that they had a mechanic for any situation. It wasn’t my job to humiliate the pilot. He probably did that to himself. My job was to instill confi dence in my crew that they could tell me anything. They didn’t need to hide anything from
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HelicopterMaintenanceMagazine.com October | November 2015
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