15 Feb 2012, 01:05
Some of the most memorable pranks I witnessed during my Air Force career were dreamed up by crew chiefs and maintenance techs...
Hand a newbie a box of 100 each fine thread 1/4" bolts that are about three inches long. Then hand him one 1/4" nut and tell him he needs to perform a thread check on each and every bolt by hand-tightening the nut all the way down until it bottoms out and then spinning it back off. The reasoning is it's far better to find bad threads now than to find them when you're working on a jet.
Tell a newbie you urgently need some .020" steel safety wire but nobody has any so he's going to help you with an "old school workaround". You grab a roll of .041" safety wire and cut off a piece about 10 feet long. Place one end of the wire securely in a vise or wrap it around something so it will not come loose (very important). Then attach a pair of large vise grips to the other end once again securing it in a manner so it will not come loose. Have the newbie use both hands on the vise grips to start pulling with everything he's got to stretch the .041" wire thinner and thinner until it becomes .020" wire. For full dramatic effect, you should use a micrometer to continuously measure the diameter of the wire as the newbie pulls and pulls and pulls to stretch the wire. "Keep pulling... keep pulling... there's .039... .038... .037... don't stop... .035... c'mon pull harder... .034... "
An F-4 crew chief was going to show his newbie E-1 how to replace his jet's battery. Damn! The brand new battery had the positive and negative terminals reversed which prevented him from installing it and base supply had no more in stock. No problem... he sent his newbie off in search of the K-28 Polarity Reverser.
An F-4 crew chief informed his newbie E-1 that it was base policy for new troops to wear their BDU's with the right sleeve rolled up and left sleeve rolled down during their first day at work so everyone would know they were newbies.
The same F-4 crew chief had another newbie E-1 stand at the base's main gate exit on a Friday afternoon so he could wave at everyone leaving the base on their way home from work. The crew chief had pre-arranged it with the gate guards and told the newbie that it was tradition for all newbies to do it.
Another F-4 crew chief had his newbie E-1 wax and polish the leading edge of his jet's wings so it could fly faster than other F-4's.
A B-52 weapons load crew had their newbie E-3 (early rank for college & ROTC experience) spend a week inspecting each aircraft's bomb bay for stray cats before weapons were loaded.
A T-38 crew chief working the graveyard shift handed his newbie E-1 a flashlight and a large yellow legal pad so he could write down tail numbers while performing the "nightly inventory" of almost 100 assigned aircraft to ensure they were all present and accounted for.
One evening in 1990, two F-16 crew chiefs, with the help of transient alert and aerospace ground equipment, conspired against a newbie crew chief who was from deep in the hills of West Virginia. They used orange road cones and caution tape to cordon off a 50-ft x 50-ft rarely used corner of the TA ramp and wedged several pencil-thin black metal rods into the rubbery sealant that's used between concrete slabs and to fill cracks. The rods were about 5 feet tall and the crew chiefs attached "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT" streamers to the top ends to form the basic shape of an aircraft... nose, tail, and wingtips. AGE positioned a boarding stand on the left side of the "cockpit" and a power unit at the "tail"... another metal rod with the power cord attached to the top with black duct tape was used to create the illusion of being plugged into the "aircraft". As darkness approached, the crew chiefs told their newbie to come along with them in a cargo van to see something few people ever get to see. They cautioned the newbie to not tell anyone what he was about to see because nobody was supposed to know about it. The newbie eagerly agreed and they proceeded to drive towards the TA ramp. When they arrived, the driver stopped about 100 feet away from the cordoned area because "that was as close as he dared to get without attracting attention". The newbie gazed thru the windshield into the shadowy twilight to behold a miracle of modern technology... a fully cloaked Stealth Fighter.
Last edited by
razamanaz on 16 Feb 2012, 23:43, edited 8 times in total.
Some people kids?
Good one Tim! If I know the C/C on a bird, we'll ask him or her to point out one of the noobs going through upgrade, fresh out of Sheppard. Invariably, we'll come back from a sortie with a circuit breaker that popped on one of the vortex generators.
