Friday, October 12, 2007

A Healthy Paranoia


"I just bought this airplane on Ebay. It has incomplete maintenance records, something about repairing the rudder, but the paint looks nice. I need you tell me if it is airworthy so we can fly it home."
Thus began my fantastic afternoon. I broke out my stubby flat and phillips screwdrivers, inspection mirror, flashlight, and recalibrated my eyeballs.
To be fair, this was just a drill. The guys with Proclaim had "maintained" a Cessna 172 while I wasn't around. My challenge was to find what was wrong with it. It was a BLAST!
Despite how I choose to play guitar (just kind of improvise) when it comes to airplanes I do have an ... Attention to Detail side, apparently. Engineering had something to do with that. I found two pages of problems. I did miss some ... sigh! But it was a great challenge.
My favorite problem? The navigation light lenses were switched, so red was on the right wing, and green was on the left. Pretty tricky!
John told me the sense of paranoia I had because I knew something was wrong was something I should keep no matter what or when the situation is.
I better go. I probably said too much. I'll tell you more later, but I need to look for a payphone.

1 comment:

Jono and Janice said...

Glad to hear you had such a good time examining the aircraft. It also sounds like you're having a great time in Minneapolis. We are looking forward to getting your newsletter. Ours is being worked on at the moment, too, so you should be getting it within the next month or so.