17 January 2009

Why aircraft are like women

THE FOLLOWING WAS POSTED BETWEEN 2 AND 3 AM EASTERN TIME.   JUST LIKE IN '24'.  WITH ME AS JACK BAUER, BECAUSE I'M THAT AWESOME.

Aircraft, much like ships, are often referred to in the feminine form. Some might say that this is because pilots have affection for their aircraft like men do for women, but this is not the case. Since the days of Amelia Erhardt, women have been aviators, so it can't be a gender thing.  It must be something else...

The reference to aircraft as women is fitting for a number of reasons, and not simply because an aircraft can weigh tens of thousands of pounds, much like an ex-girlfriend of mine weighs now (hint: chocolate truffles won't fill the hole in your soul). 

Nay, the most fitting similarity between aircraft and women is that when you ask a woman "what's wrong", you'll never really get a straight answer. Much is the same with aircraft.

Currently, I am stuck. I'm replacing a crew that flew the aircraft earlier in the day and experienced a split between the torques of the two engines--one engine read that it was producing very little power, the other that it was producing a lot of power. They landed at a nearby airbase, and I, along with a fresh crew, was shuttled over to pick up the aircraft and fly it back once it got fixed.

This should have been a few hours.

(That was three days ago)

Normal troubleshooting would indicate that the engine that was producing little power was defective. So, after replacing part after part after part on that engine, the extremely gracious maintenance crew (who has catered to our needs exceedingly well here, I must say), was unable to diagnose the problem.  And as far as we can tell, it's quite a complicated one.  

So, now it's been decided that the problem wasn't an engine that was under-performing, but rather, the problem was that an engine was over-performing, and the "weak" engine scaled back the load to accommodate this. So, once again, part after part after part has been replaced on the second engine.

The good news is that our current efforts seem to have fixed fixed the original problem--go figure, as we've practically installed two entirely new engines bit-by-bit.  Even though our hosts have done an incredible job taking care of us and fixing our aircraft, it's about time for us to go back home. 

(By the way, I hear there's a swimming pool here, so if we're still broken, I think I have a plan.)

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