Forum: Air Force Life

Old School Screw Up - Simple job in a way but if you screw up the location of some of these screws, your screwed for hours....F4 - Pulling panels 111, 102 and 101, the first time I did that as a 18 year old kid, I spent four hours trying to find the right screw for the right hole (as funny as that sounds). Not a tough job by any means but a pain in the a$$ in over 100 degree weather...trust me on this.

Aero 7a Launchers on the Rhino, forget to place the "spacer" there before towing and the whole damn aircraft gets twisted...that's fun too (trying to get it to realign)...old school stuff but painful if you get it wrong

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I was waiting for someone to say exactly that one Meathook! Defintely glad you're back! Thumb

My Dad and Uncle both told me many times what a PITA those panel pulls were, and how when someone made the mistake of putting those screws in a pile...it was a long afternoon for them!

Dad said that his trick was to loosen the screws, then take masking tape, and put over the screw heads, so they all came off of the tape in the proper line.

He also often described the design of the F-4 as "Somebody suspended landing gear in the air, and then built an aircraft around it". Laughing

Your dad was 'spot on" about the tape trick. It only took once for a guy to make that mistake. Of course after it was done, here comes some hot shot NCO to remind you that you should have used tape over those screws (after the fact of course). I guess it was considered hazing of sorts,,,I earned it too, and we hardly ever used technical data, sure, we had the big huge "t.o.'s" out there but most was done from pure experiance and hands on or past jobs completed, boy I am sure glad those days are behind us.

Thanks for the warm welcome "TC" nice to chime back in and check things out, looks like lots of new folks here, that's great, nice to see the site gaining membership. I hope your dad is still around, if so, tell him another F4 crew chief says hello and thanks for his service (as yours).

Sitting behind a desk wishing I was on the Flt Line again.

Yep, I've learned noob hazing on 3 planes now. Possibly another one to come, but we shall see. Unfortunately, I lost Pops a little over a year ago. One of his favorite things to do, though, was sit and swap stories with other guys who had their time on the line. What has changed, and better yet, what THEY SAY has changed on the flight line, but has really stayed the same.

I try my best to remember all of the horror stories though. The "Do's" and "Don't Do's" of working around aircraft, that not only applied to the jets he worked on, but also apply to what I do now. There's been a couple of times I've gone tear-@$$ing into a job, and then I stop myself, and think "Oh yeah. I remember Dad telling me about this, and this is what he said to do if I ever got myself into this situation."

Sometimes the work isn't always the most pleasant, hence, this very thread, but I am a firm believer that if you can remember what some of the old craniums have taught you, it can and will definitely save your @$$ someday.

Agreed, sorry about your loss TC - I am sure he gave excellant advice to you, any father worth his salt really would - I Salute him

Thanks Meathook. Sometimes the things he would tell me would get a little lost in the jargon from time to time, but when I'd actually see it on the plane, it would come back to me, and I'd think, "Oh, that's what he was talking about. I get it!". Laughing

I want to be back out on the flightline, so sitting at a desk using a computer sucks.

Sometimes I feel that way myself, others time, thinking the wind, rain and outright cold and snow...I dont.

But I hear ya, certain times when the aircraft taxi by and the wind is slight, you can smell that jet fuel, watch the take off's and landing and know you were part of it, it always felt good to me too, I sure do miss that and the here and there engine run I would preform....I hear ya and agree

Other days, I feel, well...I had mu turn, I guess it is someone ekse's turn now but I do miss it overall as well

Gotta agree with Sixer Viper on the '106 fuel tank panels, sortin the screws was a royal PITA. Only had 6 years on her, not much I hated.

...So There I Was. I'd say one of the absolute worst for me was a 12 hour multi-leg mission in an "undisclosed location". This mission was Murphy's Law by the book. We staged out of a complete $h!thole in the desert, and started our day at Oh-F#ck-Hundred.

...And it begins!

The jet was one of the oldest, and worst in the fleet. The air conditioner did not work worth a $h!t. It smelled like a mixture of residual jet engine oil, dirt, and raw sewage...and for a good reason. MX had forgotten that they had opened a case's worth of oil cans, and then placed them back in the box. Inevitably, some klutz knocks the box over, and it spills all over the floor. This is issue one of the day.

So, we break out our spill kit, and soak up as much oil as we can, but there's still a nice film left that you could skate across...well, that or just slip and bust your @$$ anyway.

Smelled like dirt, and the AC didn't work, because it was the desert. No brainer.

Now, here's where it gets fun! It smelled like raw sewage, because the toilet was broken. It would not flush for anything, and Fleet flat refused to pump the $h!tter. So, without a flushable toilet, the book says you are not supposed to go (That's ANY aircraft with a flushable toilet, BTW, not just The Moose). However, we were cleared by headquarters to go, if we had an alternate means of flushing the toilet. We used the large water bottles you can find in most AOR bases, and poured water down the $h!tter to flush it.

So, we get to our last destination before heading back, where it is now 12 noon local, and 115 in the shade. Avionics and APU both decide to take a $h!t on us, which delays us another two hours, with our 100+ PAX sitting on the ramp the whole time. Oh yeah, they'd been waiting another 2 hours before that out on the ramp til we showed up.

We finally get our problems sorted out, thanks to one of the best crew chiefs in the Biz (Steve, if you're out there, I STILL owe you a bottle of your favorite for that one!). We then get our PAX and all of their baggage loaded, and we're ready to go.

Now, picture a plane with a crew of 7, and 100+ passengers, in a plane that stinks, and is hotter than hell, and none of whom have seen a toilet in the past 4 hours. BTW, they all have to use the toilet that can't flush, simply because the tank holds too much $h!t that Fleet refused to pump out in the first place.

On the Loadie's panel I wrote the name "Sloop John B", in honor of the Beach Boys' song, about a boat trip gone horribly wrong, and famous for the line:

"This IS the worst trip I've ever been on..."

Moral of the story? When a couple people decide to slack off on their duties, it can cause a big load of $h!t for everyone else! (Hey, that's a double pun dammit! You didn't think of it!)

Try crawling into that AFT small a$$ cubby hole on an F4 to remove the stabs!!! Assigned to the 2952 CLSS Depot team. Went TDY to Yuma, Arizona...in the middle of summer....had to have been at least 115 OUTSIDE the damn hole. Imagine how it felt inside. I was the smallest guy there so they threw me in there. Then we spent the rest of the TDY just trying to take the wings off and separate them to box up.....I hate F-4's Bang Head

Forum: Air Force Life

The worst job you experienced