Howdy!
Being located in Ft. Lauderdale, our customer base was quite varied and eclectic. One of the more colorful characters we knew was a charter boat captain for hire who owned a Cessna 177 Cardinal. The Cardinal was a sleek version of the venerable 172 Skyhawk—the windscreen was laid back and the design placed the pilot forward of the wing’s leading edge, the wing featured a laminar-flow airfoil, and it lacked the lift struts that were featured on the 172. Intended to replace the Skyhawk, the Cardinal was only in production for 10 years. Cardinal Owners are a proud bunch—they are quite loyal to the “swoopy 172”…
Our customer would come to us once every two years for the biennial transponder, altimeter, and pitot-static system certification. If he brought it to us outside that, it had to be fairly serious, bordering on catastrophic.
He was an Australian, and there were only three of us in the shop who could decipher his thick Aussie accent into American. He called one day, and left a message. By the time the boss heard it, the guy had called back several more times, in a bit of a panic. It turned out that he had a power feed for some sort of portable device, the exact nature of which I cannot recall, that wasn't providing power to the device in question. It was in the early days of GPS, but it may have been a hand-held COM radio. Anyway, whatever it was wasn’t getting power.
The boss went across the ramp to investigate. Sure enough, there was no voltage at the end of the cable. He came back to the shop to get some tools—that usually meant he dragged me across the ramp with my tools, since he didn’t have his tool bag in the shop most of the time. We grabbed a few bicycles and pedaled across the ramp. The boss opened the baggage compartment door—a square opening with rounded corners that measured about 24” square—pulled the interior panel, and gained access to the battery to check things out.
The customer, who always referred to himself as “a poor boat captain”, wanted to help. I guess he figured the bill wouldn’t be so bad if he pitched in. As the boss wigged his way into the baggage compartment to look things over, our poor boat captain was in his hip pocket. We had to remind him that there wasn’t really enough room for one, let alone two, in that compartment. We finally got him to hang back as we went to work.
The boss’s hand poked out of the door, grasping a fuse. I checked it with a meter, and it was good. I handed the fuse back. Next, I saw a short tail of a wire in his hand with a hand-written tape flag on it. Before I could get close enough to see, our poor boat captain stuck his head inside. I heard a muffled question, and the boat captain moved closer and asked to repeat the question.
“What does that say?” came the question.
“Wot?” asked the customer.
“What does that tape flag say?”
“Wot’s a tape flag, mate?”
“The tape, it has something written on it! What does it say?” The boss was getting hot—literally. It was late July in South Florida, so the temperatures were in the high 90’s outside. Inside that battery compartment was probably closer to 105 degrees.
“It says ‘tab’”, our captain says.
I looked at the scene with a puzzled look on my face. “Tab”? What the hell is “tab”?
I heard the boss call for me. I asked the boat captain to move aside. The boss said, “Look at that tape flag and tell me what it says…”
“BAT”, I said. “I guess it is supposed to the battery.”
It was connected to ground, as was the other conductor of the pair of wires.
Apparently, our poor boat captain decided to install this by himself to save about $40 in labor. He never connected the positive wire to the voltage source—in this case, the positive terminal of the battery. Both wires were tucked under the battery's ground terminal...
From that day on, whenever he would call, the whole shop would put on our best “Crocodile Dundee” accents: “We got one from the poor boat cap’n, mates! Fosters all around! Shrimp on the barbie later…”
“It says ‘tab’!” became an inside joke. He was a good sport about it. He would come by and be what we called a "hangar bum" every so often, even after the company started to send the piston maintenance work away so they could concentrate on Learjets.
Unfortunately, the airplane was destroyed one night when somebody broke into the maintenance hangar and set fire to it, using the Cessna as the closest source of an accelerant—the arsonist opened the wing fuel cocks and threw a match. The airplane was disassembled for an annual inspection, and the only parts that survived were the wing tips and the cowling. The rest was a pile of ash with a well-done engine block sitting on top.
As any true Cessna Cardinal fan would do, he bought another with the insurance money. But he forgot to do one important thing—get a pre-purchase survey. Had he done so, we would have told him to pass or renegotiate—it had a dated stack of Narco radios in it, and those radios took a fair amount of upkeep…
But that's another story for another time.
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As I type this, I am back among the ranks of the gainfully employed. I am working remotely for a company that writes supplemental maintenance documents for a major airframe manufacturer. So far, it has been a lot to absorb...
I’ve been introduced to the modern method of aviation technical writing, using tools like Adobe FrameMaker and XML. As I told my trainer, the content isn’t the problem—I have used similar manuals for many years. Figuring out how FrameMaker works and where to get the basic data I need to write from are the challenges. But I’m doing well and actually having fun—I had been told FrameMaker is a bit of a nightmare, but once you understand how it is structured (and that it is structured, unlike the way most of us use MS Word), it works quite well and is easy to use. Now, we have the frames templates (I believe in some conventions it is called "schema") already established, so I can’t say what it is like establishing the frames themselves, so…
My writing has come a long way since I first used WordStar, EasyWriter, WordPerfect, and AppleWorks back in the day.
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With the Phantom Menace behind me—the 1/72nd scale 43 Squadron Phantom FG.1 got finished a few weeks ago--I’ve moved on to other projects. The primary effort was intended to be the Aeroclub 1/48th scale Gloster Gamecock Mk.I, I’ve had in progress since around 2016, but I also wanted a quickie.
As I looked at the stacks, I remembered that I bought the Authentic Airliners 1/144th scale Convair 440 kit a few years ago (I also bought their CV-580—I will probably have to draw the artwork myself for the livery I want to place upon it). I also acquired the Vintage Flyer decal sheet that featured the Delta Air Lines airplanes, so I got started.
These kits are very nice, indeed. Actual construction only took a few evenings—the joy of well-done resin kits is their easy and quick assembly. Before I knew it, I had it in primer (Badger’s white Stynylrez—I have mixed opinions). A few more short paint sessions, and it is now sitting in its drawer, waiting for decals.
The base is interesting—I’m using a genuine Delta Air Lines cutting board that I picked up at one of their surplus sales during the annual Airliner Collectibles Shows held at the museum. I used my normal method of painting a section of mat board to resemble the terminal ramp—in this case, the ramp around the old Hartsfield jet terminal where the Renaissance Atlanta Airport now stands.
The Gamecock was ready for paint—at least, as ready for paint as it was going to be—so I primed it in preparation for final colors, too. I decided that it would be marked as a 43 Squadron airplane, too (they named themselves “The Fighting Cocks” when they equipped with the type) so I laid out and cut the checkerboard markings with tape. The airplane is now painted and clear coated, but is it nowhere near being finished. I still have to make the wing struts, exhaust, cabane struts, and a bunch of other parts. But it is one step closer to being completed, so that makes me happy…
I will probably try to paint all but the serials on this one. I still need to dig up the closest paint matches for RAF roundel red and roundel blue, circa 1927, but the rest should be easy. The serials are a unique type face, so I’ll probably have to draw them in Inkscape and print them onto decal film.
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Reunion planning is progressing nicely.
I've been asked why this one seems to be more important to me than the previous reunions. I missed the previous events due to various instances of "life getting in the way". This one, our 40th, may well be the last one many of my classmates will make. Our class motto was "The Chosen Few". Well, the laws of nature dictate that we will become fewer in the years to come. We lost one classmate less than two weeks ago to complications of diabetes and COVID-19, and another is fighting Stage 4 colorectal cancer and the prognosis isn't good. One of our reunion chairs has early-onset Parkinson's, and only through DBS surgery has she been able to continue a semblance of a normal life.
So, I'm planning to go this year. In my advanced sentimentalism, I've realized that you don't go to see. You go to be seen. You go to reconnect with friends, and to (belatedly) make new ones.
That’s all I have for this installment. Thanks for reading! Be good to one another, and as always, I bid you Peace.