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The reliability problems with the Phoenix remind me of my experiences with TOW missiles. Every single live fire I was at half of them wouldn't detonate, the other half would nosedive into the ground about 100 meters in front of the Stryker/Bradley. Then again they were really old stockpiles, and we could only get a couple of live ones at a time.
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Apr 24, 2014 01:41
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I was watching some gun show on tlc about the m1 sniper rifle and they were still shooting .50 cal ammo that was made during ww2.
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Apr 24, 2014 01:43
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jaegerx posted:I was watching some gun show on tlc about the m1 sniper rifle and they were still shooting .50 cal ammo that was made during ww2. The USAF flying aircraft from the 1950s blows my mind. Although the KC-135s I've seen have been lovingly maintained. That might be due to them being Guard birds. AD ones probably look like poo poo. Holy poo poo did the Navy hate the F-111B. It left such a bad taste in their mouths that Grumman almost lost the Tomcat to McDonnell Douglas just because they were a big subcontractor for it. Guilty by association. bloops fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 01:47
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jaegerx posted:I was watching some gun show on tlc about the m1 sniper rifle and they were still shooting .50 cal ammo that was made during ww2. Gunpowder is nitrocellulose with various stabilizers, pretty well stable over long time periods. Solid rocket fuel OTOH is held together with a rubber binding agent, which I imagine is more susceptible to degradation.
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Apr 24, 2014 02:01
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holocaust bloopers posted:The USAF flying aircraft from the 1950s blows my mind. Although the KC-135s I've seen have been lovingly maintained. That might be due to them being Guard birds. AD ones probably look like poo poo. "...Not Enough Thrust In All of Christendom..." is probably one of my favorite one-liners in congressional testimony history. The McAir VFX entry was kinda neat looking, there is a Topping model of it sitting in a dusty window of the dusty little local air museum.  Very much a swing-wing F-15. Slo-Tek fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 02:04
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Psion posted:My other favorite AF story is when, at some interservice meeting thing, an Air Force Major who didn't understand naval ranks (but I repeat myself), gave a USN Captain a lot of poo poo about being in the service for so long and not getting promoted above Captain. Lots of poo poo, wouldn't stop talking. Being an Air Force brat myself, I use to live in NWF near Eglin, and stories abound of some idiot airmen getting confused when visiting Pensacola NAS, or some idiot sailor doing the same when visiting Hurlburt or Eglin. Though anecdotes persist that whatever contingent of Marines would be stationed at P'cola tended to go out of their way to shop at the Commissary and BX on Hurlburt. And of course, Captains of one service or the other going to hotels or TLQs familiar with the other branch getting rooms either way above their rank, or way below, depending on who it is. Favorite little ditty, involves golf. It goes, a Navy officer of some significant rank invited an Air Force officer of equally significant rank to visit his base and play a round of golf. While playing, the AF officer notices the sticks in the middle of the fairway (Navy golf courses have these poles about 100 yards from the cup or so) and asked the Navy officer about them. "A sailor shoots better when he can see a mast on the horizon." Sure enough, the AF officer played his best game on that course. Otherwise, my dad, retired helicopter crew chief who was stationed with the 16th at Hurlburt (Pavelows), was involved with exercises with one of the carriers (I think the Kitty Hawk) when it was passing through Jacksonville. Apparently the Captain of the ship told all the crew "anyone in BDUs is special forces, clear the way." So my dad had a fun time walking around the ship watching the sailors jump out of his way.
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Apr 24, 2014 02:50
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Psion posted:the story I read was F-106s vs F-16, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a 106 driver do the exact same drat thing to an F-15. Yup, that's the one thanks for finding it. Nostalgia4Infinity posted:Yeah my experience with military fighter pilots is that if they're O-3 or below they are gigantic entitled man children. Had a Captain Code 3 my jet because "the A/C wasn't cold enough". Helped E&E run a 5 hour diagnostics to find nothing was wrong with it. That was a fun 12 hour shift You had poo poo debriefers and poo poo Production. That's not a Code 3, that's a Code 2 CND, and any Pro Super who'd say otherwise isn't worth their stripes.
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Apr 24, 2014 05:08
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I will never forget the glare a crew chief gave me after I had him write up a light bulb change because "hey you performed a maintenance task!" That was back when I was in the school house being trained on the line. I was a moron back then still kinda am
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Apr 24, 2014 05:13
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holocaust bloopers posted:To be fair Navy ranks are loving confusing. I feel like if you're going to understand one naval rank, ever, it ought to be Captain = high rank = maybe shut up. It's like the one naval rank with literally centuries of history to it as "Yes, captain means serious business when it comes to ships."
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Apr 24, 2014 06:04
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iyaayas01 posted:You had poo poo debriefers and poo poo Production. That's not a Code 3, that's a Code 2 CND, and any Pro Super who'd say otherwise isn't worth their stripes. That was the 67th half of the 18th AMXS circa 2009! The 44th swing shift was always done and out at least 4 hours before we were (I had more 12 hours shifts than not) and were usually done by 7pm on Friday (again we pulled a 12 almost every Friday). I will contend that it was the worst-managed AMXS in the entire US Air Force. I loving hated my unit with a passion. An it was the entirely cause by E-7's and above. holocaust bloopers posted:I will never forget the glare a crew chief gave me after I had him write up a light bulb change because "hey you performed a maintenance task!" What light was it? I know most lights on the Eagle were red /'s not x's and he could have signed off himself -- except for the tail lights that had to be safety wired and constantly burnt out 
Nostalgia4Infinity fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 06:13
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Snowdens Secret posted:
In addition to the age issues (which is why Iran's stockpile is worthless as weapons) two of the missiles the Navy fired for real failed to light properly and fell out of the sky. I've read they were incorrectly loaded by a crew that was used to working on S-3s, but I have no idea if either of those is accurate. jaegerx posted:I was watching some gun show on tlc about the m1 sniper rifle and they were still shooting .50 cal ammo that was made during ww2. I've got a bunch of surplus M2 ball ammo (.30-06) from the 50s and 60s, and iirc DOD finally depleted it's WWII Purple Heart stocks enough to order new ones, so that doesn't sound surprising. Godholio fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 14:26
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Godholio posted:
Hell, I still have some 9mm Luger my grandfather brought back (along with a nice artillery Luger) from his time in Germany during the Late Unpleasantness. I really need to fire it off one of these days.
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Apr 24, 2014 14:33
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They made a lot of .50 BMG ammo for WWII. Most cheap surplus .303 was made when Britain still had a proper empire. A good bit of cheap surplus 7.62x54R was made before the revolution.
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Apr 24, 2014 14:50
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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holocaust bloopers posted:I will never forget the glare a crew chief gave me after I had him write up a light bulb change because "hey you performed a maintenance task!" Nostalgia4Infinity posted:Yeah my experience with military fighter pilots is that if they're O-3 or below they are gigantic entitled man children. Had a Captain Code 3 my jet because "the A/C wasn't cold enough". Helped E&E run a 5 hour diagnostics to find nothing was wrong with it. That was a fun 12 hour shift In the squadron I'm in after we're done flying, the practice is that the instructor pilot writes up the flight record while the students that were with him fill out any gripes on the plane itself. Each of these gripes can either be designated as an upper (plane can still fly) or downer. My instructor had me fill five last night: four for dim light bulbs and one for the a/c not being cold enough and wanted me to down the plane  having to explain those to the maintenance lead, a guy thats worked on these planes for twenty years, was pretty difficult
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Apr 24, 2014 15:16
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No .mil pilot should ever shirk away from writing up a "silly" fault, even if they're not sure. Maintainers should, correspondingly, not gripe (too much) about silly write ups, because if the system in question operates within limitations then they can sign it off. A pilot who thinks he's being cool by not reporting something potentially out of tolerance is potentially harming the readiness of the fleet. The government spent money on an air conditioner, so if it doesn't work to the standards in the book then it needs to be fixed.
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Apr 24, 2014 17:35
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Ambihelical Hexnut posted:No .mil pilot should ever shirk away from writing up a "silly" fault, even if they're not sure. Maintainers should, correspondingly, not gripe (too much) about silly write ups, because if the system in question operates within limitations then they can sign it off. A pilot who thinks he's being cool by not reporting something potentially out of tolerance is potentially harming the readiness of the fleet. The government spent money on an air conditioner, so if it doesn't work to the standards in the book then it needs to be fixed. No those are silly rear end write ups.
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Apr 24, 2014 17:47
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holocaust bloopers posted:No those are silly rear end write ups. Could you imagine if the galley items were treated like that? Tinker would've had 3 flyable jets after canning every tail.
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Apr 24, 2014 18:00
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Delivery McGee posted:They made a lot of .50 BMG ammo for WWII. And keep in mind the whole reason the Garand was .30-06 caliber instead of .276 Pedersen was that that dickbag MacArthur said to do it that way because of all the .30-06 surplus from the previous war. So now, this much later, the discussed replacements for 5.56mm are all essentially ballistic twins to .276 Pedersen.
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Apr 24, 2014 18:16
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Ambihelical Hexnut posted:No .mil pilot should ever shirk away from writing up a "silly" fault, even if they're not sure. Maintainers should, correspondingly, not gripe (too much) about silly write ups, because if the system in question operates within limitations then they can sign it off. A pilot who thinks he's being cool by not reporting something potentially out of tolerance is potentially harming the readiness of the fleet. The government spent money on an air conditioner, so if it doesn't work to the standards in the book then it needs to be fixed. You're right that there is a balance, because I've also been on the receiving end of "what do you mean you didn't know about problem 'x,' it's happened on the last five sorties!?!" *goes and checks IMDS, finds nothing* "Uh, if y'all don't write up the problem in the forms we don't know it's broken, if we don't know it's broke we can't fix it." So yes, writing (legitimate) stuff up is important and you aren't doing maintenance any favors by not telling us something is broken, but stupid write-ups just piss us off and waste our time. Stupid writeups would be stuff that doesn't impact the ability of the aircraft to perform its mission and/or stuff that doesn't have hard limits established in the tech data. So in other words, if you can tell me that the A/C is completely broken and it makes it a little difficult to effectively fly a low level hop in the Persian Gulf with totally NMC A/C, that's a legitimate writeup. Similarly, if you can show me that the "A/C needs servicing" light is on and according to the Dash 1 that means mx needs to come out and troubleshoot, no issues, totally legitimate. "A/C isn't cold enough"? Pretty much this: holocaust bloopers posted:No those are silly rear end write ups. e: To be clear, I'm not saying that I expect ops to come debrief the jet armed with references for legitimate write-ups, 99% of legitimate write-ups are going to be commonly understood between ops and mx as something that is flat out wrong with the jet. I'm just saying that if ops asked themselves those two questions (does this truly impact the jet's ability to carry out the mission and is there a reference for this write-up) before writing something questionable up, things would be a lot happier between the two communities. e2: CommieGIR posted:check the Ks. lol iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 18:56
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Ambihelical Hexnut posted:No .mil pilot should ever shirk away from writing up a "silly" fault, even if they're not sure. Maintainers should, correspondingly, not gripe (too much) about silly write ups, because if the system in question operates within limitations then they can sign it off. A pilot who thinks he's being cool by not reporting something potentially out of tolerance is potentially harming the readiness of the fleet. The government spent money on an air conditioner, so if it doesn't work to the standards in the book then it needs to be fixed. No. The poo poo they write up constantly (like SKE and other avionics crap that isn't even mission necessary) is poo poo we've told them over and over and over to just NOTE or check the Ks. I know, I know, I'm expecting a bit much. But to be fair, the pre-flight routine by the FE always involves checking the Ks, at which point if the pilot wants to write something up that is already in the Ks, the FE should be aware of something like that. I mean, c'mon, use info notes or something. Once again, I'm expecting a little much... CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 19:01
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Godholio posted:Could you imagine if the galley items were treated like that? Tinker would've had 3 flyable jets after canning every tail. Some dipshit pilot, in his first month at Elmendorf, made the FE write up every burnt out annunciator light bulb and other nit picky poo poo. 74 write ups.
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Apr 24, 2014 19:08
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holocaust bloopers posted:Some dipshit pilot, in his first month at Elmendorf, made the FE write up every burnt out annunciator light bulb and other nit picky poo poo. 74 write ups. Hahahahaha...I don't know if balls 9 had that many write ups after it tried to force the crew to land in Baghdad.
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Apr 24, 2014 19:35
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Godholio posted:Hahahahaha...I don't know if balls 9 had that many write ups after it tried to force the crew to land in Baghdad. I'm pretty sure I know what FE was on that jet. He was a schoolhouse instructor. That was the loss of generators IFE if we're talking about the same one. bloops fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 19:38
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Ambihelical Hexnut posted:No .mil pilot should ever shirk away from writing up a "silly" fault, even if they're not sure. Maintainers should, correspondingly, not gripe (too much) about silly write ups, because if the system in question operates within limitations then they can sign it off. A pilot who thinks he's being cool by not reporting something potentially out of tolerance is potentially harming the readiness of the fleet. The government spent money on an air conditioner, so if it doesn't work to the standards in the book then it needs to be fixed. Haha gently caress you. Edit: Ok so I'm just going to assume you have a very superficial understanding of this topic. First off you're right there are explicit roles between the pilot and the maintainer. There's also a great deal of trust and something comes along with this relationship: professional courtesies. 1.) A red X means the aircraft cannot be flown until the discrepancy is fixed. A red \ means there is a discrepancy that needs to be fixed but the aircraft is still flight-worthy. It is possible to downgrade an X to a \ which probably should have happened in this situation but we had chickenshit leadership who didn't want to question pilots and wouldn't listen to what people on the line were saying  . Typically we'd have 2 or more "go's" a day. Meaning the jet will fly a morning sortie, be inspected, refueled, and serviced so that it can fly a second sortie in the afternoon this was done so that we could keep the pilots current on their training requirements. Spare jets would be available but considering we were working on aircraft that were over 25 years old, we usually only had one or two spares. If we ran out of spare aircraft a pilot would miss a training flight that would have to be made up so they stayed current. To that end, unless it was something super serious, a pilot wouldn't squawk (report) a code 3 (red x condition exists) on the first go. They would usually squawk a code 2 (red \ condition exists) and it was a "fix it if you can during the turn" (time between sorties) situation. This pilot squawked a code 3 for something that was clearly not a red x condition (see point 2) on the first go thus taking the aircraft off the roster for the next sortie -- kinda a dick move.2.) How can I say "A/C not cold enough" isn't a red X condition? Because an actual red X condition involving the A/C is usually an inflight emergency. Namely, something broke in the environmental controls and hot (like oven hot since it is jet engine bleed air) air is being blown into the cockpit. The pilot declares an IFE and immediately returns to base because you most certainly don't want to create a situation where the pilot has to jettison the canopy to maintain control of the aircraft -- or god forbid eject. 3.) When that jet taxied into the spot it had me (a 5-level), some weapons guy as my b-man (he helps with aircraft recovery), a crew chief 7-level (Ok, so in the Air Force you have 1,3,7, and 9 levels; you left tech school as a 3-level and your first task on the flight line was to finish your PME's to get upgraded to 5-level), another 7-level crew chief, and the E&E (an entire job field devoted to environmental systems) 7-level on shift. So three people on that spot who are essentially experts, and one person who's pretty on the ball (the weapons guy who doesn't count  ) wanting to spend a couple of minutes talking with the pilot before he went to debrief about this issue. Hopefully troubleshoot it quickly to determine if it was really a red X condition. Professional courtesy usually dictates that when maintainers want to ask you a few questions about the condition of an aircraft you talk with them they're the experts on the aircraft's many mechanical systems. Unfortunately the spot was towards the end of the line and crew bus was already waiting to take this captain to debrief so he gave us some sketchy details and hopped on board. Nobody stopped him because another professional courtesy is you don't really do that to pilots. We hoped that the pilot thought about it while writing up his post-flight report or someone up in the squadron building talked some sense into him (fat chance on the latter but you never knew). Unfortunately when I got the forms back, they had a big fat red X in them for "A/C not cold enough". At this point we figured that hey maybe there was something wrong with it and proceeded with the aforementioned six hour troubleshooting began.4.) Six hours later we found nothing (well I think a seal was worn but within limits but E&E just replaced it anyway) and declared the aircraft flightworthy. No harm no foul right? Wrong. Manning is a huge issue on the flight line. From what I understand it used to be that every aircraft in the squadron used to have a 7-level, a 5-level and a 3-level assigned to it and they only worked on that aircraft and worked as a team. The 3-level had plenty of time to apprentice (which is really their job) with the 7-level and 5-level to really learn the aircraft before becoming a 5-level. Circa 2009 (and I assume it is still the case) we barely had enough people in our AMU to cover three shifts and that was before factoring in things like bullshit appointments, people being farmed out for stupid poo poo like gate duty (which was extra stupid at Kadena because is was essentially watching the Japanese contractors working the gate), mandatory CBT's about stupid poo poo like sexual harassment, and folks taking leave. Put simply, people are stretched thin and the traditional system of training people breaks down. I talk a lot of poo poo about pilots, but I honestly don't think I could do their job. Could you imagine looking at someone barely out of high school with less than a year of training telling you that yeah the jet is safe to fly? Takes a lot of balls, in my opinion. So as a 5-level doing the troubleshooting kept me from helping out the 3-levels: making sure to check their work, helping them with a tricky task, or simply answering questions and helping them. Manning was even worse for E&E. The 7-level was in the middle of training a few new people on a fairly uncommon inspection when he got pulled to do this troubleshooting. He left a newer 5-level to train them, but it is extremely unlikely that this 5-level had anything close to matching the 7-level's experience. Did this 5-level train the new people properly? Did he miss something? When those 3-levels are 5-levels will they miss that same thing on an inspection? Hopefully not, but no one really can know for sure. So there you have it, bullshit write-ups not only waste time and violate some pretty fundamental professional courtesies, but when coupled with critically low manning silly write-ups potentially generate unforeseeable consequences down the road. tl;dr: you don't know what the hell you are talking about 
Nostalgia4Infinity fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 19:39
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Phanatic posted:And keep in mind the whole reason the Garand was .30-06 caliber instead of .276 Pedersen was that that dickbag MacArthur said to do it that way because of all the .30-06 surplus from the previous war. The real reason was logistics, since .30-06 would still be needed for the BAR.
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Apr 24, 2014 20:34
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Haha, jeez guys. I'm sorry if my tone was terse, but I've almost been killed by maintenance failures a few times and in my life as a pilot, maintainer, maintenance manager, and test pilot I've seen a lot of undocumented minor things turn major as well as a lot of bitching and moaning over (usually junior) pilots who get nitpicky with no effort to correctly educate them. If a pilot is writing up something incorrectly then there are plenty of maintenance officers who are happy to tune them up, but I've found the case more often to be systemic laziness or the desire to feel persecuted. Even if it doesn't kill someone, these routinely noticed performance issues with certain systems have to be documented because they can tend to point to future failures that leave aircraft stranded at places without maintenance. Maybe attitudes are different in the fixed wing world since nobody ever has to shut down at a tiny fob in the mountains, but in my aircraft the air conditioning system has standards in the book that can be measured and can cause problems when degraded. Hugs and kisses all around. Nostalgia4Infinity posted:A novel. Hello, I think we are arguing about two different things: I am saying that military aircraft are flown largely by people who do not understand aircraft maintenance, and maintained largely by people who do not understand flying. The adversarial culture this generates tends to make people want to avoid looking stupid/angering each other, and that attitude reduces readiness because you have guys who don't write up faults for fear of looking like a dick to the maintenance guys. Resource limited, undermanned maintenance dudes (esp. the young ones) play into this to avoid having yet another bird downed in their shift. "The cockpit only smelled like fuel in the beginning of the flight, but it seemed okay at the end so I shouldn't red X it because they need this bird for the next mission set." This attitude is pervasive and dangerous on both sides of the house. I have tried to educate many of the guys I fly with on finding where the line lies, but in any uncertainty they must always write up on the side of caution, even if the problem is seemingly small. You (I think) are saying that you wasted a lot of man hours chasing a problem that was insufficiently documented because you were unable to get relevant information out of the pilot. This is the pilot's fault, and the fault of the chain of command (maintenance officers) who failed to help you rectify that of course. I have put a lot of boot into pilot rear end over this issue in my career, because it also destroys readiness and wastes time. This is a problem, however, it is not the same problem as maintainers who view system degradation (a/c blows hot) as a pilot complaining too much issue instead of a maintenance issue. That is what I understood you to be talking about, and what I was responding to. I do, in fact, understand aircraft status symbols and their significance, and while red X conditions often lie with things that you might associate with an in flight emergency, they simply document any condition (in the opinion of the writer) that makes the aircraft unsafe for flight. And when most of your pilots don't understand maintenance, it's a lot better to have them X something stupid to ensure that you, the maintenance expert, have a chance to review it than to leave it out there flapping. If our communication issues are continuing then you probably won't believe this, but I have spent years fighting my colleagues for wasting my maintainers' time. And as someone who has been the first guy to take up an aircraft they just spent weeks tearing down, I definitely respect the relationship of trust and courtesy. Ambihelical Hexnut fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 20:44
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luminalflux posted:Stockholm Arlanda used to have an endless line of fuel trucks driving basically this route through the city and up to Arlanda. There's a fair amount of traffic on Vallhallavägen and it's more or less a miracle no bad accidents happened. Since 2006 though they ship to a different harbor that has a rail link to a fuel depot near the airport and take it through a pipeline the rest of the way. Grisslehamn?
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Apr 24, 2014 20:52
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Nostalgia4Infinity posted:First off you're right there are explicit roles between the pilot and the maintainer. There's also a great deal of trust and something comes along with this relationship: professional courtesies.... Thank you for this excellent post. I was trying to follow the discussion up to it but it was mostly unintelligible to me. You pretty much covered everything I was unclear about as an aviation-minded, but non-military/non-maintenance person.
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Apr 24, 2014 21:48
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The Ferret King posted:Thank you for this excellent post. I was trying to follow the discussion up to it but it was mostly unintelligible to me. You pretty much covered everything I was unclear about as an aviation-minded, but non-military/non-maintenance person. I can elaborate more on the subject of 'silly rear end write up' vs something minor that needs to be put in the forms. The differences are slight, honestly. It's experience and judgment.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:12
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Groda posted:Grisslehamn? Gävle hamn. There's no rail road to Grisslehamn and that harbour is tiny and only for passenger ferries. It sure would be fun with fuel transports on the road from Grisslehamn though... It's not the safest road to begin with and with fuel transports to Arlanda added it could get interesting.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:29
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CommieGIR posted:No. The poo poo they write up constantly (like SKE and other avionics crap that isn't even mission necessary) is poo poo we've told them over and over and over to just NOTE or check the Ks. Are you talking about SKE, like, Station Keeping Equipment, because if so that can definitely be mission necessary according to the AMT. Sure, you can technically speaking fly an airplane without it, but semantics etc. I've seen aircrew down planes for dumb reasons and I've watched maintainers try and give me planes that are completely non-mission capable, so basically what I'm saying is we're all terrible
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Apr 24, 2014 23:27
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Prop Wash posted:so basically what I'm saying is we're all terrible
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Apr 24, 2014 23:31
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holocaust bloopers posted:I'm pretty sure I know what FE was on that jet. He was a schoolhouse instructor. That was the loss of generators IFE if we're talking about the same one. Pretty sure I knew all the crew FEs on that trip, but the only person I could pin to that crew is the AC. But yeah, that was generators...lots of generators. And the start of several months of major issues with that jet. AFCENT loving sent it home after a month of replacing everything over and over as it fried itself. Pretty sure it spent several weeks at Lakenheath trying to get home. Then a few weeks later (right after we got home), the eng panel arced while taking off at Langley...high speed abort, brakes overheat and fuse. Crew tries to use the aft door, but the slide connector thing was dry rotted and the slide blew away. That was the reason the fleet was grounded until they were all replaced with new ones that had a serial number. Jet was stuck on the runway for most of the day until a jack could be trucked in from Norfolk. They brought the crew back commercial and flew another (incl me) out 2 weeks later to bring it back. That's the jet I wish had face planted at Nellis.
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Apr 25, 2014 00:53
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Prop Wash posted:Are you talking about SKE, like, Station Keeping Equipment, because if so that can definitely be mission necessary according to the AMT. Sure, you can technically speaking fly an airplane without it, but semantics etc. SKE is not flight critical and is a diagonal write up. Ask me how I know.
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Apr 25, 2014 01:25
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Some of this maintenance discussion seems pretty bizarre. In my squadron, at least, we have a procedure called "talking to the maintenance desk chief" when we come back from a flight, where we can discuss whether it would be productive to write up whatever minor random gripes we found, like two reasonable adults. I know that AF maintenance is handled a lot differently than Navy, but is there really that much disconnect between ops and maintenance? [e: just went back and read N4I's edit a few posts back, that sounds like a complete douchenozzle of a pilot and a terrible way to handle discrepancy write-ups] I'm generally of the opinion that if something is not operating as designed, and can be fixed at our level, it's worth writing up, no matter how minor. That way maintenance at least has SA to the discrepancy, and it becomes a documented part of that aircraft's book so future crews know what to expect. Things like burned out lights, paneling falling apart, and yeah, even warm air from the AC is absolutely worth writing up. Maybe there is something legitimately wrong with the AC system, and it could be something that can easily be fixed once it's pointed out. It doesn't have to be a high priority or down the plane because of it, it's just in the system for whenever they have an opportunity to look at it, or a later crew comes back and says "yeah, the AC was fine, super cold, Wingnut's a whiny bitch" and they can close it out. e2: maybe AF aircrew have a lot more authority to declare an aircraft "down" than we do in the Navy. We can inform maintenance that a plane is down when we get back due to X gripe, and we can elect not to take an aircraft flying if we don't feel it's safe*, but maintenance control is ultimately in charge of saying what constitutes a downing discrepancy. Though again, if there's uncertainty about it they'll call up some pilots to discuss it. * my favorite instance of that was when an engine tech said "yeah, that's out of limits right now, but once you get airborne it should be fine". Turns out we didn't need to go flying that badly.
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Apr 25, 2014 01:57
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Wingnut Ninja posted:e2: maybe AF aircrew have a lot more authority to declare an aircraft "down" than we do in the Navy. We can inform maintenance that a plane is down when we get back due to X gripe, and we can elect not to take an aircraft flying if we don't feel it's safe*, but maintenance control is ultimately in charge of saying what constitutes a downing discrepancy. Though again, if there's uncertainty about it they'll call up some pilots to discuss it. They have a book that decides. The book is run over on pre-flight and checked to see if the flight can commence if specific systems are faulty. But they tend to no follow the book, nor check the K's in the forms for systems that are already written up but have been pushed to the K's for later maintenance or because its a system that is constantly faulty but cannot be replicated on the ground. However, I'm on JSTARS now, and we do post landing maintenance meetings with the crew leads and we usually hammer out what needs to be written up and what doesn't need to be written up in the meeting. Its a little better that way.
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Apr 25, 2014 02:21
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Wingnut Ninja posted:I'm generally of the opinion that if something is not operating as designed, and can be fixed at our level, it's worth writing up, no matter how minor. That way maintenance at least has SA to the discrepancy, and it becomes a documented part of that aircraft's book so future crews know what to expect. Things like burned out lights, paneling falling apart, and yeah, even warm air from the AC is absolutely worth writing up. Maybe there is something legitimately wrong with the AC system, and it could be something that can easily be fixed once it's pointed out. It doesn't have to be a high priority or down the plane because of it, it's just in the system for whenever they have an opportunity to look at it, or a later crew comes back and says "yeah, the AC was fine, super cold, Wingnut's a whiny bitch" and they can close it out. The issue is that he Code 3'd it and put a red X in the forms, as opposed to Code 2'ing it and just putting a Red \. The former requires troubleshooting and a relatively high (7-level) inspection prior to clearing, the latter can be pushed to the K's as a deferred/delayed discrepancy or briefly "troubleshot," written up with an IFOC (in-flight ops check), and cleared when the next crew comes along and goes "yeah it's fine, dude who wrote it up's an idiot," exactly like you say. This leads me to... Wingnut Ninja posted:e2: maybe AF aircrew have a lot more authority to declare an aircraft "down" than we do in the Navy. We can inform maintenance that a plane is down when we get back due to X gripe, and we can elect not to take an aircraft flying if we don't feel it's safe*, but maintenance control is ultimately in charge of saying what constitutes a downing discrepancy. Though again, if there's uncertainty about it they'll call up some pilots to discuss it. You're absolutely right that maintenance determines status while ops determines airworthiness and whether or not they're going to take the plane, works the exact same in the AF. We have the MESL (Minimum Essential Subsystem List) that we utilize to determine status, they have the MEL (Minimum Essential List) that they use to determine if they can take the plane and employ it effectively on a sortie; the listings are usually very similar but not identical. If an aircrew puts an X in the forms for a bullshit write-up there are procedures to clear or downgrade the X without going through 8 hours of troubleshooting. The root cause of the issue N4I described that kicked this whole discussion off is that he had lovely leadership (absolutely shocking in USAF mx). The Production Super (SNCO, usually E-7) is the guy who is in charge of all maintenance efforts at generating sorties. In an ideal world, the Pro Super would be engaged enough to catch the pilot in debrief to tell him that he was full of poo poo and that wasn't going to be a Code 3 red X write-up, it was Code 2 at best. While I'm sure the Pro Super at Kadena c.2009 probably had 5000 other things to do, especially if this was in the turn between first and second goes (reference the manning challenges AMUs have that N4I referenced in his post), if he heard a jet was squawking Code 3 for ECS without declaring an IFE that should've raised his bullshit flag (as opposed to say, Code 3 for radar or FLCS, which I'm pretty sure happens at least once a go at any F-15 base). That said, even if for whatever reason he didn't catch it in debrief he could've gone back after the fact and elevated the issue to AMU leadership for them to either downgrade the X to a \ or clear it altogether as a bullshit write-up without going through the 8 hours of troubleshooting. Unfortunately the leadership at the time were apparently idiots who didn't want to question ops. So basically Prop Wash posted:so basically what I'm saying is we're all terrible
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Apr 25, 2014 03:26
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CommieGIR posted:SKE is not flight critical and is a diagonal write up. Okay yeah but all slapfights aside if we say we need SKE it's because we're careening aircraft around inside a loving cloud within 1000 feet of each other and we're trying to not create pretty explosions. That's potentially important! Again it depends on the AMT, like literally we do not need SKE in order to take off an aircraft but if SKE fails in a formation, and we're in a cloud, and all of a sudden we see an aircraft make a break turn to avoid smacking directly into our aircraft within like 200 feet of us, it's a thing that drives me to drink every single time I think about it and consider that I probably could have died there were it not for sheer dumb luck. But how do you know.
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Apr 25, 2014 04:36
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Haha OK so for everyone who is wondering about the ops/MX rift just read the last few posts.
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Apr 25, 2014 04:41
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Also I've flown mission-capable aircraft across 2000 miles of water, because they were completely a-ok according to the MEL, which is what aircrew use, and when I land I find out that the maintenance guys have been decertified because the plane was not ok according to the MESL, which is what maintenance uses to determine if a plane is ok. As a result we all ended up getting drunk in Wake Island for like a week, which determined that we all were OK.
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Apr 25, 2014 04:47
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