PLANE TALK I found that in the airline business
we did not have as much time to ‘play’ around as we did in military service. In civilian work there was always aircraft to work on. In the service, once all aircraft were launched you had an hour or so to play around. I do recall a couple of incidents we thought funny until we realized all the damage that was done. Once on a prop aircraft doing a run-up, someone was going to show us how to fix the mag drop by running the engine to high power. Unfortunately, he did not check how close behind us some light aircraft were and rolled one across the ramp. It seemed amusing at the time, but rebuilding it was not so much fun. The second incident was running up a 747 and watching the big ice chunks flying behind it; again no one noticed that the ice chunks were flying over the blast fence onto cars. There was an active Interline club
in Toronto, so there were plenty of parties and dances. There was always great fun with lots of door prizes like a weekend in Hong Kong or an all- inclusive week in Jamaica courtesy of one of the airlines. I worked on some aircraft from the Caribbean but was always worried about bugs or snakes being in the walls or elsewhere. I know I am a little paranoid, but we did find some. I guess this is a hazard for maintenance techs, but something that no one ever told me about in basic training. One event that some fellow techs and I found comical was when our boss granted us all two days off with pay because we had worked so much overtime. This overtime had already been paid out. But instead of taking his generous offer of two days off with pay we all went to work on a DC-4 inspection in another hangar, being greedy I guess. Anyway our boss found out and he was a little annoyed to say the least. He was trying to be a good boss and we all
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messed up. Lesson – no good deed goes unpunished. Another favourite trick we had
was to be the first to meet the arriving aircraft, especially those from Florida. As soon as the passengers had deplaned, we locked the doors and refused to let groomers on saying that we had to do an engine run. Why do that? So we could grab the lobster from first class and have a delightful working man’s meal. Unfortunately, Food Inspection Canada screwed that all up by insisting all food be incinerated for health reasons. None of us ever got sick, and the aircraft leftovers fed a lot of techs and pilots. I brought home so many steaks that even my dog got tired of eating steak! Being first on the aircraft had other benefits like finding extra booze bottles. If a passenger was over his or her customs limit, they would leave the extra bottle in the overhead bins or hat racks as we called them then. A lot of pornographic magazines were found there as well. The single guys claimed those – I was married so I took the booze. While I was working at the
Toronto base, my crewmate and I had to fix some galley problems on an aircraft from Montreal that was passing through Toronto. We heard the stewardesses who were speaking French talking about how stupid the techs from Toronto were. I guess they assumed everyone in Toronto only spoke English. My teammate spoke several languages fluently including French, and I had a very good understanding of the language and spoke it marginally. We let them carry on and then told them in French how we fixed the snag. You never saw two more embarrassed looking faces; hopefully they learned a lesson.
GOVERNMENT WORK My first government job was working for the Ontario Government
Department of Transport in vehicle safety system research. You may wonder why they hired AMEs or aircraft technicians. AMEs are one of the few trades that study and work on all systems. When you think about it, other trades tend to concentrate on a specific area. An example is heating and air conditioning techs do just that, while aviation techs do that and electronics, hydraulics and so on. We did a lot of interesting work on truck safety, fuel economy, seat belts and such. There was a lot of technical work regarding accidents and I was also taught to be a test car driver for highway surface testing. I missed the field of aviation, so when the test work section was reorganized I applied to Transport Canada and was accepted. So now I was working for the Feds as an inspector. In a previous article I revealed how, as a new inspector, I embarrassed myself by grounding an aircraft that had no engines installed. It was not funny at the time but I can now chuckle about it. Lesson – failure can sometimes be good. I found Transport Canada (TC) basically a fun place to work. When I first arrived there in 1975 it was mostly staffed with ex-military pilots and AMEs/techs. There was the usual joking between the service types as some were from the navy, the army and a mix from civilian careers. The air force types predominated. At one headquarters meeting the discussion was on the moth insect breakout in the forests of Ontario. We did not have enough spray planes available in Canada and were discussing the idea that we may have to bring in American aircraft. The issue was that the American aircraft were type certificated at a higher gross weight than the Canadian models. Now you recall that DeHavilland had an aircraft called the Fox Moth from the 1920s – a biplane.
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