29 Mar

The last few days have been interesting to say the least and not a whole lot of fun. First a little background – since we are an oddity in a helicopter brigade there are lots of people that think they need to know our status (i.e. if the aircraft are mission ready).  So at the end of each day I send out a status report (in addition to the two monthly reports that I send out the middle and end of every month) that consists of two spreadsheets that say the same thing but in different formats for different customers. I would add a not to the daily status explaining upcoming maintenance because if I didn’t people would email back asking questions about how long repairs would take and the like.  When I first took over from the other maintenance officer the distribution list on this report consisted of over 30 people. Thinking this was more than ridiculous one of my first goals was to narrow that down – I didn’t get very far. For everyone I deleted somebody else would pop up saying they needed to know our status.  

     Well that all changed a few days ago.  One of our aircraft was getting ready to go into phase and there was much concern because we had a lot of missions coming up. I had to repeatedly explain that airplanes are different than helicopters in that they can do a progressive phase where the work is done in between flights. As a result we don’t anticipate any loss of mission capability except that once the phase is complete it will require a test flight. We had it all worked out that the phase would be finished Tuesday night, we would do the test flight Wednesday and it would be ready for mission that night. When I landed Tuesday morning after my mission one of our mechanics came up and said we had a little problem. They were running up one of the engines to do some checks when a gust of wind took a ladder that was lying on the other side of the aircraft and slid it underneath the plane where it contacted all three of the prop blades. Needless to say this was not good news since they didn’t have a spare prop on hand. Working on the old adage that bad news doesn’t get better with time I went back to the office and updated my status report to include a short explanation about what happened and how long I thought the aircraft would be down.

     I hit send and waited for the phone calls – the first one came in less than a minute. It was the brigade maintenance shop asking if the safety office needed to be notified because that is what usually happens if there is an aircraft incident. That was my first clue that I shouldn’t have hit send. I have been in the Army long enough to know better but I was thinking entirely form a maintenance point of view plus as I explained for the nth time these aircraft are just leased by the Army. They are owned by the contractor, maintained by the contractor and the contractors were running the engine so the Army has no liability and no reporting responsibility. The only consequence is that we now have one less airplane to operate for a few days. That has turned out to be a very had concept to get across as it is outside of most Army aviator’s experience. The other thing I soon discovered is that while bad news may not get better with time it gets much worse when it comes from the top down. It turns out one of the unknown people on the list I inherited works at division and happened to be sitting at his computer when I hit send. For reasons known only to him he decided to call brigade with the juicy bit of news that one of brigade’s aircraft had just been in an accident. As it so happens one of the few people I did not have on my list was the brigade commander. It goes without saying that he was not pleased to first hear from division that one of his aircraft was damaged. At this point I was seriously regretting hitting send. The fact that I was just sending out a maintenance update and that nothing was required to be done on the Army side was completely lost. The words aircraft and accident were mentioned together and that was the end of it.

     Several days later and it think we have it under control. Two good things did come out of it – the command has a much better understanding of what it means to have a leased aircraft and my status report goes out to a lot fewer people. It turns out they didn’t all need to know after all.

Clear H76 L43