Airplanes are People, Too

It’s funny the way avi­a­tors talk about their air­planes. Every flier’s got his favorite jet, the one he’s most com­fort­able in and which behaves best for him. “Every air­plane is dif­fer­ent,” explains one main­te­nance sergeant here at Al Asad air base in west­ern Iraq.
Each of Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332s dozen F/​A-​​18D Hornets has a slightly dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tion of sen­sors and sys­tems, which par­tially explains their unique per­son­al­i­ties. But even jets with the same equip­ment tend to have dif­fer­ent tem­pera­ments.
In any squadron, the main­tain­ers know the air­planes in ways the fliers don’t. After all, they’re the ones turn­ing wrenches, pump­ing lubes and bang­ing their shins on pan­els 12 hours at a time to keep the birds in the air for three or four hours every other day. And main­tain­ers will tell you: some­times there are jets that just refuse to coop­er­ate. “Hangar queens”, they’re called.
332 is lucky. It doesn’t really have any hangar queens. And the hard work of suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions of main­tain­ers, plus a care­ful cadre of pilots, has achieved a notable dis­tinc­tion: in early 2005 the squadron marked 100,000 hours with­out crash­ing a jet, one of the best safety records of any Marine Corps jet squadron. This long streak of good for­tune has made every­one a lit­tle super­sti­tious, and the last jet that crashed, A-​​6E Intruder no. 05 back in 1978, haunts the ready room like a ghost. “Nobody talks about 05,” says one offi­cer.
Jets are like diesel engines: the more you work them, they more reli­able they are — to a point. 332 is wring­ing more flight hours out of its jets than ever, thanks to the relent­less pace of oper­a­tions in Al Anbar province. At some point in the near future, there will be a reck­on­ing. The fly­ing here is not ter­ri­bly tax­ing, just a lot of medium-​​altitude cruis­ing, but still… most fast jets are good for only around 8,000 hours, and the Hornets here have eaten up just under ten per­cent of that total in the past seven months alone. Worse, the Marine Corps’ single-​​seat birds will be swapped out for Joint Strike Fighters some­time after 2012, but no one’s pos­tu­lated a replace­ment for the hard­work­ing F/​A-​​18Ds.
–David Axe

January 31st, 2006 | Axe in Iraq (and Elsewhere) | 18121 Comment »http://defensetech.org/2006/01/31/airplanes-are-people-too/Airplanes+are+People%2C+Too2006-01-31+11%3A54%3A50murdoc You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.