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Never argue with the crew Chief
FINALLY got this digitally colored up for 
OldTiger that WAS supposed to be for Christmas. But my cohort in crime, Richard was being hogtied by a local lamprey instead til I got to Tucson.
Any any good Air Force pilot knows, You may be the pilot, but the crew chief is letting you use it, and you must bring it back intact.
Hope you like Colonel!
OldTiger that WAS supposed to be for Christmas. But my cohort in crime, Richard was being hogtied by a local lamprey instead til I got to Tucson.Any any good Air Force pilot knows, You may be the pilot, but the crew chief is letting you use it, and you must bring it back intact.
Hope you like Colonel!
Category Artwork (Digital) / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1100 x 850px
File Size 562.9 kB
Never ever argue with the crew chief, your life is in their hands - and you don't want them thinking that their lives would be so much easier without you around.
On the other hand they might just save your life! The T2-C has wing-tip tanks that each hold a hundred gallons of jet fuel. A crew had done their walk around and had mostly strapped themselves in when their crew chief thought he saw something odd. The kids (idiot pilots) had been in a hurry and hadn't noticed that one of their tip tanks was full - and the other one was not ... (And I know they've lost at least three pilots when they lifted off the ground only to discover that there isn't enough flight control on the bird to recover from an extra six hundred pounds hanging off the end of one wing.)
Then there's always bad management (the bean counter types that will gloss over things to get/keep their numbers up.) I'd come in early for my evening shift and checked with dispatch to see what day shift had found on a problem I'd left them the night before. A fuel readings problem that should have forced them to defuel the bird and pull it into the hanger (and this was a 'red X', meaning the bird can't fly until it's fixed.) Nothing, the error hadn't been signed off and hadn't been left in the bird's books (all pages are kept, though past fixed issues are in a separate book so QA could track trends.) Oh - for added fun said bird was going up in a few. I had an even dozen people mad at me when I walked out dispatch to the flightline and downed that bird (they had the engines lit! ) Dispatch was even less happy with me when I walked in ten minutes later with QA behind me. (Found out later that they knew all about the red X and were now trying to cover their tracks/involvement.)
Good times.
On the other hand they might just save your life! The T2-C has wing-tip tanks that each hold a hundred gallons of jet fuel. A crew had done their walk around and had mostly strapped themselves in when their crew chief thought he saw something odd. The kids (idiot pilots) had been in a hurry and hadn't noticed that one of their tip tanks was full - and the other one was not ... (And I know they've lost at least three pilots when they lifted off the ground only to discover that there isn't enough flight control on the bird to recover from an extra six hundred pounds hanging off the end of one wing.)
Then there's always bad management (the bean counter types that will gloss over things to get/keep their numbers up.) I'd come in early for my evening shift and checked with dispatch to see what day shift had found on a problem I'd left them the night before. A fuel readings problem that should have forced them to defuel the bird and pull it into the hanger (and this was a 'red X', meaning the bird can't fly until it's fixed.) Nothing, the error hadn't been signed off and hadn't been left in the bird's books (all pages are kept, though past fixed issues are in a separate book so QA could track trends.) Oh - for added fun said bird was going up in a few. I had an even dozen people mad at me when I walked out dispatch to the flightline and downed that bird (they had the engines lit! ) Dispatch was even less happy with me when I walked in ten minutes later with QA behind me. (Found out later that they knew all about the red X and were now trying to cover their tracks/involvement.)
Good times.
Heh, butterbar getting his first checkflight in a T-37 asked me if I'd ever flown in one of them. I stepped back like he'd threatened mew with bodily harm and said: "Are you kidding? I know what type of maintenance goes into these things - you ain't getting me in one of these deathtraps!"
Yes, I knew his pilot, who just shock his head and said: "Thanks a lot!"
Training bases were so much fun.
Yes, I knew his pilot, who just shock his head and said: "Thanks a lot!"
Training bases were so much fun.
Flew Tweets for three years as a FAIP. Flew only German and Dutch students. Interesting. Can't find a more fun jet to fly--built for spins (which is like buying a car built for crashes) but it was so stable in the spin you could nail the altitude and heading after running the BOLDFACE recovery steps if you wanted to. Sucked as a cross country jet though--slow and no pressurization.
Never had a serious MX problem, unlike the FCF flights in the Hog, where you went LOOKING for them. On purpose. And found them, on occasion. Funny how a quick-disconnect main fuel line to an engine can...quickly disconnect. That's why we had two motors, I guess. My F-16 buddies looked at me funny when I told them I shut down both motors in flight (one at a time, of course) to check both the APU and windmill air start functions. They frown on that sort of thing, having only one to begin with.
The one thing I never had to ops check was the ejection seat. But, since we share the same seat with the F-15 and 16, the number of times the Lawn Dart guys use theirs sort of covered that base.
I kid. I kid.
Never had a serious MX problem, unlike the FCF flights in the Hog, where you went LOOKING for them. On purpose. And found them, on occasion. Funny how a quick-disconnect main fuel line to an engine can...quickly disconnect. That's why we had two motors, I guess. My F-16 buddies looked at me funny when I told them I shut down both motors in flight (one at a time, of course) to check both the APU and windmill air start functions. They frown on that sort of thing, having only one to begin with.
The one thing I never had to ops check was the ejection seat. But, since we share the same seat with the F-15 and 16, the number of times the Lawn Dart guys use theirs sort of covered that base.
I kid. I kid.
Ha. The T2-C wasn't really made for long distances, but we had an instructor with a home emergency prove that one could make it all the way from Key West FL to NAS Kingsville TX in one hop.
He did cheat a bit. He climbed to near the bird's ceiling and then chopped an engine and idled the other one back to give him the best 'glide' ratio. Once he was getting low he air-started his off engine and did the most economical climb back up before chopping the other engine and doing it again.
And not buying a car for crashing - drifting maybe ...
And yeah, I know about kidding. We lost an F4 while I was in Korea. Night launch, you could really see the afterburners as it took off, then the engine roar backs off before coming back up to power - normal as the afterburners are shut down - but the afterburners were still going strong. They tried several more times, but the afterburners wouldn't disengage (turned out a linkage had dropped/come loose). Pilots landed seven miles downrange, aircraft (still in afterburner - but parts had been burning/falling off for a while now) impacted eleven miles downrange. (It was four days of digging in a rice patty to recover the kit/kir in the nose.)
I got dirty looks from some when I joked that the commander would be happy to chew those pilots out for losing their bird. "They barely got out with their lives!" I was told. My reply was, "Yeah, and that's why the commander will enjoy chewing them out - it beats the hell out of writing one or two of those 'we regret to inform you' letters!"
Thanks for the art and chat, it brought back some nice memories.
He did cheat a bit. He climbed to near the bird's ceiling and then chopped an engine and idled the other one back to give him the best 'glide' ratio. Once he was getting low he air-started his off engine and did the most economical climb back up before chopping the other engine and doing it again.
And not buying a car for crashing - drifting maybe ...
And yeah, I know about kidding. We lost an F4 while I was in Korea. Night launch, you could really see the afterburners as it took off, then the engine roar backs off before coming back up to power - normal as the afterburners are shut down - but the afterburners were still going strong. They tried several more times, but the afterburners wouldn't disengage (turned out a linkage had dropped/come loose). Pilots landed seven miles downrange, aircraft (still in afterburner - but parts had been burning/falling off for a while now) impacted eleven miles downrange. (It was four days of digging in a rice patty to recover the kit/kir in the nose.)
I got dirty looks from some when I joked that the commander would be happy to chew those pilots out for losing their bird. "They barely got out with their lives!" I was told. My reply was, "Yeah, and that's why the commander will enjoy chewing them out - it beats the hell out of writing one or two of those 'we regret to inform you' letters!"
Thanks for the art and chat, it brought back some nice memories.
Oh, I made a few friends too, including the pilots after they were told 'why' I yanked them out of their bird. No one likes the idea of being an accident waiting to happen, and it's not just their lives - but whatever/whoever they might land/crash on.
While never having to have cleaned up a crash site myself I have had to handle the pieces recovered. I much preferred those that the pilots were able to eject in time and the craft didn't take anyone with it.
The 'nicest' crash I ever had to deal with was while I was at Bergstorm AFB (85-89). A RF-4C was shooting touch and goes when several things went very wrong at the worse possible time.
A little pre-staging in in order to understand what befell them. The engines (J-79s if I recall) have a 600 hour run limit before they are removed to be torn down and rebuilt (going longer greatly increases the chances of it failing) and to not have two 'soon to die' engines in the same bird the Air Force liked to try to keep them about 300 hours apart (one new/old and the other at its expected midlife). Oh, and Bergstorm is south of Austin TX and we normally have Southern breezes/winds in the area.
On to our fun. The bird in question had an engine at 599.x hours, good for one last flight before a mandatory engine change, the other was low 300s. They took off and flew for an hour before coming back to shoot a couple of touch and goes before calling it a flight. On their (last to be) touch and go they touched down and then brought the engines back up to lift and go around again. From the reports I heard, they had just cleared the end of the runway when old 600+ came apart on them, a ring of compressor blades coming apart and literally slicing their way out of the engine. Four of the blades sliced through thin metal and into a fuel cell, we now have a fire as well as a dead engine. Unlike the movies you might still have some time to work/move the craft before having to bail, but one blade had cut through the metal between the engines an hit the still good engine's fuel control. So the pilots now had a dead engine, a fire, and an engine they can't get any power out of. The last fun fact, we had a Northern that day and you always want to land/take off into the wind - so they were stuck with almost no power, airspeed or altitude, and pointed at Austin during lunchtime.
Bergstorm's on a slight hill and I was told by those that watched it that the bird hit the horizon before the pilots ejected. With no choice in avoiding a crash they rode it to the last second - stalling the bird the best they could to reduce the path of destruction. How'd they do? The bird pancaked barely nose up and one wing low. And as there's no way to see under the bird from the cockpit it was pure dumb luck or a deity intervention that had it impact in an empty lot next to a u-stow&-go. I said nicest crash I'd ever seen, they brought the bird home on several flatbed trucks rather than the hundreds of little bags of bits you see of most crashes.
While never having to have cleaned up a crash site myself I have had to handle the pieces recovered. I much preferred those that the pilots were able to eject in time and the craft didn't take anyone with it.
The 'nicest' crash I ever had to deal with was while I was at Bergstorm AFB (85-89). A RF-4C was shooting touch and goes when several things went very wrong at the worse possible time.
A little pre-staging in in order to understand what befell them. The engines (J-79s if I recall) have a 600 hour run limit before they are removed to be torn down and rebuilt (going longer greatly increases the chances of it failing) and to not have two 'soon to die' engines in the same bird the Air Force liked to try to keep them about 300 hours apart (one new/old and the other at its expected midlife). Oh, and Bergstorm is south of Austin TX and we normally have Southern breezes/winds in the area.
On to our fun. The bird in question had an engine at 599.x hours, good for one last flight before a mandatory engine change, the other was low 300s. They took off and flew for an hour before coming back to shoot a couple of touch and goes before calling it a flight. On their (last to be) touch and go they touched down and then brought the engines back up to lift and go around again. From the reports I heard, they had just cleared the end of the runway when old 600+ came apart on them, a ring of compressor blades coming apart and literally slicing their way out of the engine. Four of the blades sliced through thin metal and into a fuel cell, we now have a fire as well as a dead engine. Unlike the movies you might still have some time to work/move the craft before having to bail, but one blade had cut through the metal between the engines an hit the still good engine's fuel control. So the pilots now had a dead engine, a fire, and an engine they can't get any power out of. The last fun fact, we had a Northern that day and you always want to land/take off into the wind - so they were stuck with almost no power, airspeed or altitude, and pointed at Austin during lunchtime.
Bergstorm's on a slight hill and I was told by those that watched it that the bird hit the horizon before the pilots ejected. With no choice in avoiding a crash they rode it to the last second - stalling the bird the best they could to reduce the path of destruction. How'd they do? The bird pancaked barely nose up and one wing low. And as there's no way to see under the bird from the cockpit it was pure dumb luck or a deity intervention that had it impact in an empty lot next to a u-stow&-go. I said nicest crash I'd ever seen, they brought the bird home on several flatbed trucks rather than the hundreds of little bags of bits you see of most crashes.
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