Back to Work

I had a couple of weeks off over Christmas and New Year's. It was pretty quiet, except for the ELT search.

I was back at work on Tuesday, 4 January, on day shift. Day shift generally means inspections, which I like. The airplane arrives around midnight, we start on days at 7 am, do the inspections and some routine work, and finish at 3:30 pm. The evening crew fixes the snags and gets the airplane out. The next morning, it flies on a regular passenger flight.

The airplanes I work on are nearly exclusively Airbus A320 series, which are great airplanes to work on, very well designed from a maintenance point of view.

The airplanes come in for one day, and we do one-third of a C Check each day. The C Check is divided into phases - fuselage and gear, wings, and engines and tail. This week we had two engine checks, one wing check, and one fuselage / gear check. It's pretty random.

Generally, engine checks have the most work, and fuselage / gear checks have the least.

On the engine checks, you have to remove lots of panels to expose the inside of the pylon, open the fan cowls, and open the thrust reverser halves. Generally two to four people will unbutton the engines. Once the panels are off, I can start the inspection - although of course you're looking around the engine as you're taking off the panels, too.

On Tuesday we had an A319 in for an engine check. I inspected the left engine (for some reason, I always inspect the left engine, not the right), and came up with about twenty snags, which is a bit more than average. Most of the snags fall into the "preventative maintenance" category - fix it now before something expensive develops. It's extremely rare to find something really serious - so rare it's called "killing the airplane", meaning the airplane won't go out on schedule. I found a variety of damaged clamps, bushings, and bonding wires, that needed replacement.

On Friday, we had one of the ex-Canadian Airlines A320s in for an engine check. I don't like those airplanes as much, they are slightly non-standard. This one was very good on the engine inspection, though, about seven snags. Fifteen snags is probably average, so I had no complaints about this engine. Having few snags makes for an easy inspection, you can take a bit more time and be very thorough.

We had a wing inspection on Wednesday. Again, the first hour or so is spent removing panels, and then the inspection can begin. Wing inspections are generally pretty easy, I have never found a major mechanical fault on a wing. The inspection covers the visible part of the wing structure, the slat and flap drive mechanisms, and the aileron.

Fuselage and gear inspections are the lightest checks, usually. I inspect the passenger doors, and occasionally the landing gear. On Thursday, I had quite a few snags on the passenger doors, and we had to sling two of them. On one door, there was play in the connection between the door lifting mechanism and the support arm - wasn't so bad, but it was a slow day, so we fixed it, taking about an hour to do it. On the other door, the support arm bearing was shot, and had to be replaced. That's a fairly big job, two people for about four hours. The biggest problem we encounter in repairing these items is usually that the hoist point plugs won't come out, and you spend quite a bit of time extracting / destroying them.

So I'm back on evening shift this week. If anything exciting happens, I'll put it up.