MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S DEFINITION OF GUILT IS: THE FACT OF HAVING COMMITTED A BREACH OF CONDUCT, ESPECIALLY VIOLATING LAW AND INVOLVING A PENALTY. THE STATE OF ONE WHO HAS COMMITTED AN OFFENSE ESPECIALLY CONSCIOUSLY.
If you are overlooking inspection procedures or
shortcutting your maintenance, then you SHOULD feel guilty. There are all kinds of ethical and legal ramifi cations for these kinds of maintenance actions. No, I’m talking about the second defi nition for guilt — that feeling of deserving blame, especially for imagined off enses or from a sense of inadequacy; self- reproach. Yeah, I’m talking about that uneasy feeling you get when it comes to certain maintenance tasks on your aircraft. Recently, the hospital program I work at signed a new contract with a diff erent Part 135 operator and the new company off ered us mechanics the opportunity to stay with the program. Prior to this new contract, the other operator that we worked for provided two EC135’s with approximately 5000 hrs. One was a T2+ (Turbomeca engine) and the other was a P2+ (Pratt & Whitney engine). I had attended the manufacturers EC135 Field Maintenance course about fi ve or six years ago and I have been regularly working on them for more than three years now. I also attended the Turbomeca Arrius engine class about eight years ago. There isn’t too much diff erence between the two engines, and it wasn’t too diffi cult to get familiar with these diff erences. For those of you readers that
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HelicopterMaintenanceMagazine.com February | March 2020
aren’t familiar with Hospital EMS operations, for us mechanics it can get pretty mundane or boring. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about this boredom. It means that things are going pretty smoothly in the maintenance department. We operate these helicopters on a 24/7 schedule and our job as mechanics is to keep the aircraft safe and airworthy at all times possible so that the hospital can provide their services to the community. This includes daily servicing of the aircraft systems, daily airworthiness checks, scheduled maintenance and inspections and compliance with any AD’s or bulletins that may be issued for the aircraft. For four full-time mechanics, this was a pretty easy gig. We looked at the same two aircraft for years now and we pretty well knew their quirks and their characteristics. When we could schedule down-time for scheduled heavy maintenance, we would get a spare back-up aircraft that the program could use to continue their operations while we worked on our aircraft. Our downtime provided us the opportunity to really look inside of our aircraft — something we couldn’t do regularly. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that we all felt pretty confi dent knowing our jobs. Well, now things have just changed. Prior to the transition to the new company, we were interviewed
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